A Proactive Wash droplet routing for Digital Microfluidics Biochip

Contamination occurs when multiple droplets share few cells in their route. When the first droplet passes through a shared cell, it lefts a strain of residue on this cell. At later time cycle, when the second droplet traverses through this shared cell, the leftover residue contaminates it. This may leads to erroneous experimental outcome. To avoid this, wash droplets are used for cleaning the residue. The wash droplets are sandwiched in between two functional droplets. In this article, we propose a proactive wash droplet routing that take wash capacity into account. Here, every functional droplet is tailgated by a wash droplet. When wash droplet capacity is exhausted, a new wash droplet is moved in to replace the exhausted wash droplet. Experimental result shows improvement in washing time and total turn around time.