Improvement of heat dissipation for polydimethylsiloxane microchip electrophoresis

Effective removing of Joule heat in polymer-based microchip system is an important factor for high efficient separation because of lower heat conductivity of polymers than silica or glass. In this paper, a new kind of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microchip electrophoresis system integrated with a laser-induced fluorescence detector has been successfully constructed on the basis of a commercial heat sink for computer CPU (central processor unit). Experimental results on separation current using high concentration running buffers demonstrated that heat dissipation of PDMS/PDMS microchip system was significantly improved. Furthermore, with this integrated system, theoretical plate number of fluorescein using 100 mM phosphate-buffered saline + 1 mM sodium dodecyl sulfate as running buffer was determined to be 2750 (for 2.5-cm separation channel, corresponding to 110,000/m). This high separation efficiency demonstrated that such heat sink-based polymer microchip system could be effectively applied for high-concentration buffers.