Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.
Lab-on-chips (LOCs) or miniaturized total analytical systems
(μTAS) are attractive to perform chemical and biological
analysis using small amounts of samples in a short time. Micro
machined fluidics and optical devices are integral components of
LOCs, which are fabricated monolithically or by hybrid
integration in order to perform various analytical process in a
single chip. In this work, simulation and implementation of a
microfluidic coupler for the hybrid integration of an optical
microfluidic system by using silica-on-silicon waveguides and
polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic chips are
demonstrated. The presented microfluidic coupler simplifies the
fabrication of optical microfluidic systems by coupling the fluid
from the PDMS chip to the micro channel in the silica-onwaveguide.
The micro-flow behavior through the coupler is
investigated by the simulations carried out using the COMSOL
multiphysics and the experiments as well.
