Analysis of fluid transport on porous material for flexible microfluidic device applications.

Owed to the enormous advantages like easy disposable, flexible and low cost, eco-friendly performance of paper substrate, microfluidics has expanded a new attention on the flexible substrate in the research field of environmental monitoring, medical diagnosis and food safety analysis applications. Diverse properties of paper and fluid transport mechanism on paper substrate are some crucial facilitating parameters which are used on the fabrication of functional flexible microfluidic device applications in an effectual and analytical way. Transport of any fluids on paper substrate does not require any external force because of the capillary action behavior on paper surface. When drops of fluid at the first time touch the paper substrate surface, it penetrates the paper surface radially. Radial capillary transport used in our daily life using different circumstances such as when ink, water and wine spreads in paper or cloths, rain drops in soil, and dye into yarn. Here, the attention/foundation of work is fluid transport on the texture of Whatman^TM grade 1 filter paper which is commonly used in microfluidic applications as claimed by the previously published articles. In this work, an experimental study is presented on capillary transport in radial direction to understand the texture of the Whatman^TM grade 1 filter paper substrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]