Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Chemical Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. Arvind Chandrasekaran

Abstract

Potassium in the body needs to be maintained in proper levels for the normal functioning of heart and kidneys. The aim of this work is to develop a simple technique to measure the concentration of Potassium present in a bodily fluid sample, which can be used to assess the health condition of extremely sick patients, especially when the patient's condition needs to be diagnosed and results needs to be obtained rapidly under Point-of-Care settings. Microfluidics is one of the platforms used in bio-diagnostics because of several advantages such as low sample volume requirement and integration into high-throughput screening. In this work, a polymer microfluidic device is designed and fabricated. Model test samples of varying Potassium concentrations are passed into the microfluidic channel. Colorimetric optical absorbance detection principle is used to measure the concentration of Potassium in the samples. The level of turbidity obtained when Potassium samples mix with chromogenic agent, indicates the concentration of Potassium present in the sample, which can be then detected by optical absorbance. The optical biosensing is done with the help of a handheld spectrometer, to measure the intensity of light passing through the samples, from which absorbance is calculated. The results show that the proposed integrated microfluidic optical biosensing format can be potentially used in real-time Point-of-Care applications, for the measurement of the required analyte in test samples.

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