Study of on-line monitoring of lactate based on optical fibre sensor and in-channel mixing mechanism.
Wu M-H., Wang J., Taha T., Cui Z., Urban JPG., Cui Z.
A PDMS-based microfluidic device with integrated optical fibres was developed for online monitoring of lactate. The detection is based on the optical adsorption of the colour solution formed by in-channel mixing of sample and reagent solutions. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation and kinetic study of the colour development were conducted to determine the minimum channel length and optimum residential time for homogenous mixing and maximum optical adsorption respectively. The system was proved to be able to detect lactate with good linearity (R(2)=0.98), response time of about 130 s and estimated limitation of detection (LOD) of 0.52 mM (about 47 mg/L), which is sufficient for a general online lactate detection. Due to the miniaturization of sensing system and micro-scale mixing, higher detection sensitivity (0.15 V/mM) can be realized than the mixing in lab-scale equipments (0.08 V/mM).