| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 機械工程系 === 103 === The aim of this research is to develop an integrated pipette tip which can be used in the chemistry/biochemistry lab for routine mixing and distribution activities. The integrated pipette tip included two major components, a micromixer and a micro distributor, and the core technology behind these two components is microfluidics. With this integrated pipette tip, different reagents can be well mixed and uniformly distributed into multiple centrifuge tubes with a pipette in a very short time. Following the previous results about micromixer and the micro distributor, the first part of this thesis focused on the optimization of the micromixer. The second part of this thesis focused on the integration, fabrication, and characterization of this integrated pipette tip.
The optimization of the micromixer was realized by applying Taguchi method and factor analysis on the simulation results. Once an optimized design was realized, a PMMA mold insert fabricated by a micromilling machine was manufactured for casting PDMS micromixers for experiments. Multiple experiments were conducted to characterize the mixing performance and to validate the simulation results.
To fabricate an integrated pipette tip for experiments, the idea of modularity was used. The mold insert of this integrated pipette tip included three major parts, a reagent reservoir and pipette connector made by additive printing, a micromixer made by micromilling, and a micro distributor made by Epoxy casting and. Once this modular mold insert is ready, PDMS casting was used to fabricate the integrated pipette tips for experiments. The integrated pipette tip can well mix the different reagents and distribute the mixed solution into four centrifuge tubes. Multiple experiments were carried out to study the performance of this integrated pipette tip by using liquid dyes with two different colors. Coefficient of variance (CV) was used to characterize the uniformity of distribution and the experiment results showed that a CV of 9.07% was achieved.
This study demonstrated a novel tool to perform rapid mixing and distribution of different reagents only with a pipette. With this integrated pipette tip, the required time for sample preparation for chemical/biochemical experiments can be significantly reduced to enhance the experiment efficiency.
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