Technologies & Capabilities

CiDRA® Precision Services, LLC  prides itself on providing the appropriate technology to meet its customers’ flow cell requirements, and with over 20 years of product development, design, engineering and manufacturing expertise we do not try to force fit a single technology to solve customer's problems.  Our rich technology portfolio allows us to design and manufacture flow cell products of all fluidic regimes even down to the lab-on-a-chip scale. 

SlipStream™ Flow Cell Technology
SlipStream™ Flow Cells are layered structures fabricated with BioGasket™ technology to form flow channels.   This technology is ideally suited for consumable or perminant flow cells for Life Sciences instruments.
   
BioGasket™ Technology
BioGaskets™  are custom PDMS  gaskets with proprietary surface activation that promotes leak free, covalent bonds with common life sciences and medical device materials. 
   
Glass Blowing and Forming
These flow cells, made by  glass forming and blowing, are used in a variety of markets, including life sciences, medical devices and analytical instruments.  They tend to be physically larger than most flow cells but they are also generally multifunctional. 
   
Hard Material Precision Machining
Ranging from simple to highly complex, these flow cells are precision machined from bulk materials such as glass and sapphire.  Due to the inert and stable properties of the materials, precision machined flow cells are primarily intended as permanent components in instruments, where the analytes are corrosive or interrogated at high temperature, or where three-dimensional optical interrogation is required.
   
Polishing & Coating
Many flow cell used as permanent components of instrumentation applications are designed to integrate as much optical functionality as possible into the design.  While this tends to make the flow cell a relatively expensive component, the part cost is easily justifiable by cost savings from part count reductions elsewhere in the design or by enhanced measurement fidelity.   Designers following this path often require optically polished and coated flat and contoured surfaces.   
   
Fluidic Interconnects
Standard and custom fluidic fittings are used to interface flow cells to all kinds of instruments.  These fluidic interconnects can be as simple as gasketed compression fittings to standard Luer fittings.
   
Materials
CiDRA® Precision Services, LLC manufactures flow cells from a wide variety of hard materials, including glass, ceramics (SiN, SiC, etc), sapphire, silicon and others.  They can even be fabricated from materials with dissimilar thermal expansion coefficients and electrical properties such as silicon and fused silica, enabling the integration of electronic and optical characteristics in a single device.  This high degree of flexibility allows customers to choose the optimal materials for thermal, optical, mechanical, chemical or manufacturing requirements.