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Guided and fluidic self-assembly of microstructures using railed microfluidic channels

Nature Materials volume 7, pages 581–587 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

Fluidic self-assembly is a promising pathway for parallel fabrication of devices made up of many small components. Here, we introduce ‘railed microfluidics’ as an agile method to guide and assemble microstructures inside fluidic channels. The guided movement of microstructures in microfluidic channels was achieved by fabricating grooves (‘rails’) on the top surface of the channels and also creating complementary polymeric microstructures that fit with the grooves. Using the rails as a guiding mechanism, we built complex one- and two-dimensional microsystems in which all the microstructures initially involved in the fabrication method were incorporated as components in the final product. Complex structures composed of more than 50 microstructures (each sized smaller than 50 μm) were fluidically self-assembled with zero error. Furthermore, we were able to use the rails to guide microstructures through different fluid solutions, successfully overcoming strong interfacial tension between solutions. On the basis of rail-guided self-assembly and cross-solution movement, we demonstrated heterogeneous fluidic self-assembly of polymeric microstructures and living cells. In addition to such assembly of in situ polymerized structures, we also guided and assembled externally fabricated silicon chips—demonstrating the feasible application of railed microfluidics to other materials systems.

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Figure 1: Concept of railed microfluidics and guiding mechanism (see Supplementary Information, Movie S1).
Figure 2: Guided self-assembly of microlatches (see Supplementary Information, Movie S2).
Figure 3: Complex self-assembly in railed microfluidics (see Supplementary Information, Movie S3).
Figure 4: Heterogeneous self-assembly of microstructures made of different materials using cross-solution movement.
Figure 5: Immediate application examples applying the railed microfluidic design to tissue engineering and microchip packaging.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by the System IC 2010 project of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy and the Nano Systems Institute National Core Research Center (NSI-NCRC) program of KOSEF. We thank M.-O. Lee of the College of Pharmacy, SNU, for providing the cell line.

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Author notes

  1. Su Eun Chung and Wook Park: These authors contributed equally to this work

  2. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science #066, Seoul National University, San 56-1, Shillim-dong, Kwanak-ku, Seoul 151- 744, South Korea

  3. Inter-university Semiconductor Research Center (ISRC), South Korea

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sunghoon Kwon

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  1. Su Eun Chung
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  2. Wook Park
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  3. Sunghwan Shin
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  4. Seung Ah Lee
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Correspondence to Sunghoon Kwon.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Section S1–S3 (PDF 313 kb)

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Movie S1 (MOV 3937 kb)

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Movie S2 (MOV 4858 kb)

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Movie S3 (MOV 3738 kb)

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Movie S4 (MOV 2208 kb)

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Movie S5 (MOV 577 kb)

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Chung, S., Park, W., Shin, S. et al. Guided and fluidic self-assembly of microstructures using railed microfluidic channels. Nature Mater 7, 581–587 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2208

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