What is microfluidic technology?

Microfluidics is a technology that can accurately operate and control microscale fluids, especially submicron structures. In the 1980s, microfluidic technology began to emerge and developed in fields such as DNA chips, lab-on-a-chip, micro-sampling, and micro-thermodynamics.

Microfluidic chips were originally called "labs on a chip" in the United States and "micro-integrated analysis chips" in Europe. They are the main platform for the realization of microfluidic technology. They can combine biological, chemical and medical analysis processes. Basic operating units such as sample preparation, reaction, separation, and detection are integrated into a micron-sized chip to automatically complete the entire analysis process. Microflow control chips have the advantages of light size, small amount of samples and reagents, fast reaction speed, large amounts of parallel processing, and disposable use. They have great potential in biology, chemistry, medicine and other fields, and have been developed in recent years. It has become a new research field that intersects biology, chemistry, medicine, fluids, electronics, materials, machinery and other disciplines.

Why do we need laser welding machines for microfluidic chip manufacturing?

So why do we use laser welding of microfluidic control chips? What I want to introduce here is the core of point-of-care testing - microfluidic chip. Microfluidic chips integrate a series of steps such as sample preparation, biochemical reactions, and result detection onto a very small plastic-based chip. If we want to subsequently convert the reagent volume into microliters or even nanoliters or picoliters, the requirements for the welding process are very high.

However, some common ultrasonic, hot pressing and adhesive technologies have fatal flaws. For example, the disadvantage of ultrasonic technology is that it is easy to overflow and dust; the disadvantage of hot pressing technology is that it is easy to deform and overflow, and the production efficiency is extremely low. However, the disadvantage of adhesive is not only that the adhesive easily contaminates the flow channel, but also increases production costs due to process requirements.

                             
Many point-of-care test manufacturers intend to gain more value in this fierce competition, so they continue to improve parallelism, automation and integration, hoping to develop better testing technology. Microfluidic chip laser welding machine is an indispensable and important equipment.

Since laser welding is non-contact welding, an extremely fine laser beam invisible to the naked eye is used to scan the chip during work, and the parts that need to be welded can be connected at an extremely fast speed without any impact on the flow channel. The welding accuracy from the edge of the welding wire to the flow channel is about 0.1mm. The entire welding process has no vibration, no noise, and no dust. Therefore, this extremely clean precision welding method is highly sought after in the precision welding needs of medical plastic products.

This high-precision, fast, extremely clean and easy-to-operate equipment is undoubtedly the most suitable equipment for the point-of-care testing industry. For the vigorous development of the point-of-care testing industry in the future, I believe that microfluidic chip laser welding machines will also become the preferred equipment for all point-of-care testing manufacturers!