Fabrication, Estimation and Trypsin Digestion Experiment of the Thermally Isolated Micro Teactor for Bio-chemical Reaction

This paper describes design, fabrication, and application of the silicon based temperature controllable micro reactor. In order to achieve fast temperature variation and low energy consumption, reaction chamber of the micro reactor was thermally isolated by etching the highly conductive silicon around the reaction chamber. Compared with the model not having thermally isolated structure, the thermally isolated micro reactor showed enhanced thermal performances such as fast temperature variation and low energy consumption. The performance enhancements of the micro reactor due to etched holes were verified by thermal experiment and numerical analysis. Regarding to 42 percents reduction of the thermal mass achieved by the etched holes, approximately 4 times faster thermal variation and 5 times smaller energy consumption were acquired. The total size of the fabricated micro reactor was $37{\times}30{\times}1mm^{3}$. Microchannel and reaction chamber were formed on the silicon substrate. The openings of channel and chamber were covered by the glass substrate. The Pt electrodes for heater and sensor are fabricated on the backside of silicon substrate below the reaction chamber. The dimension of channel cross section was $200{\times}100{\mu}m^{2}$. The volume of reaction chamber was $4{\mu}l$. The temperature of the micro reactor was controlled and measured simultaneously with NI DAQ PCI-MIO-16E-l board and LabVIEW program. Finally, the fabricated micro reactor and the temperature control system were applied to the thermal denaturation and the trypsin digestion of protein. BSA(bovine serum albumin) was chosen for the test sample. It was successfully shown that BSA was successfully denatured at $75^{\circ}C$ for 1 min and digested by trypsin at $37^{\circ}C$ for 10 min.