Development of an Electrowetting Digital Microfluidics Platform using Low-cost Materials

Digital microfluidics is an emerging technology which has proved to be promising in a variety of applications including protein and cell analysis. In this technology discrete droplets of fluid are manipulated instead of continuous flow in microchannels. In this paper, an electrowetting based digital microfluidics platform using relatively low-cost materials is presented. The commercially available printed circuit board technology is used for the electrode fabrication to further decrease the costs. Silicone rubber is used as the dielectric layer and a commercially available water repellant spray is used as the hydrophobic layer instead of the relatively expensive Teflon-AF commonly used in the literature. Fabrication of the device is relatively straight forward making it suitable even for disposable applications.