Here, we present three protocols for thermal measurements in microfluidic devices.
Abstract
Thermal measurement techniques have been used for many applications such as thermal characterization of materials and chemical reaction detection. Micromachining techniques allow reduction of the thermal mass of fabricated structures and introduce the possibility to perform high sensitivity thermal measurements in the micro-scale and nano-scale devices. Combining thermal measurement techniques with microfluidic devices allows performing different analytical measurements with low sample consumption and reduced measurement time by integrating the miniaturized system on a single chip. The procedures of thermal measurement techniques for particle detection, material characterization, and chemical detection are introduced in this paper.
Different thermal measurement techniques in microfluidic devices and their respective setup procedures are presented in this work. These thermal measurement methods such as thermal conductivity monitoring, thermal penetration time, amplitude of AC thermal fluctuations, and amplitude measurement of the generated heat are used to detect specific substances and investigate different reactions and interactions.
The thermal time constant plays a key role in the aforementioned thermal measurement t…