Commercial fluidic connectors coupled to macroscopic equipment such as capillary electrophoresis (CE), liquid chromatography (LC) and mass spectrometry (MS) were difficult to integrate into our microfluidic devices because they are not adapted for parallelization and they are oversized for our Chemical microprocessor (ChµP).
However, a micro-scale fluidic interface must meet further several requirements, including ease of fabrication, ease of use, minimal dead volume, reliability and biocompatibility.
On this account we developed two alternative approaches to fabricate a parallel, minimal dead-volume connector using PDMS casting techniques without use of any adhesive materials.
The 1st route describes a quick "all-in-one" fabrication method based on 3 main processing steps to realize an adhesive free, robust interconnection of hybrid microfluidic chip devices.
The alternative 2nd procedure based on five processing steps. This more flexible method could be used to produce small series of PDMS composite ledges in a separate way.
The resulting connectors are now ready for an one-step bonding procedure based of oxygen-plasma activation of the PDMS-moulded ledge and a glass capillary.