OMIS: The Open Millifluidic Inquiry System for small scale chemical synthesis and analysis

Abstract With the continued establishment of hacker-spaces and fab-labs hosted in academic libraries, there is an increase in the availability of resources for designing scientific instrumentation in the undergraduate curriculum. Many available designs, however, may be too complex to fabricate in teaching environments. Presented here is OMIS, the Open Millifluidic Inquiry System, which is a platform for performing small-scale chemical synthesis and analysis. OMIS consists of a 3D printed syringe pump, control hardware based upon the Arduino microcontroller and 3D printed reaction vessels. The OMIS syringe pump utilizes a low-power stepper motor which simplifies the instrument construction and allows for power to be supplied from batteries or the USB port of a computer. The simple design of OMIS allows for the instrument to be fabricated in one day, including the time to 3D print components. The OMIS syringe pump is able to deliver fluids at rates between 60 and 300 μL/min, depending on syringe size, with a reproducibility of 3%. Several applications of OMIS are presented, including a demonstration of laminar flow in a 3D printed millifluidic chip, implementation of a low-volume flow-cell cuvette insert and the synthesis of magnetite nanoparticles.