Measurement and control of pressure driven flows in microfluidic devices using an optofluidic flow sensor

Measurement and control of pressure-driven flow (PDF) has a great potential to enhance the performance of chemical and biological experiments in Lab on a Chip technology. In this paper, we present an optofluidic flow sensor for real-time measurement and control of PDF. The optofluidic flow sensor consists of an on-chip micro Venturi and two optical Fabry-Pérot (FP) interferometers. Flow rate was measured from the fringe shift of FP interferometers resulted from movement fluid in the on-chip micro Venturi. The experimental results show that the optofluidic flow sensor has a minimum detectable flow change of 5 nl/min that is suitable for real time monitoring and control of fluids in many chemical and biological experiments. A Finite Element Method is used to solve the three dimensional (3D) Navier-Stokes and continuity equations to validate the experimental results.