Micromachined heated chemical reactor for pre-column derivatisation

A micromachined heated chemical reactor is presented. The microreactor consists of a sandwich of glass and silicon chips and contains a reactor channel of 50 μl volume. On-chip heating resistors supply a power of 2 W, resulting in a heating rate of 2°C/s. On-chip measuring resistors enable feed-back control of the temperature. The reactor volume makes the device suitable for derivatisation purposes in HPLC. As an example the pre-column derivatisation of amino acids with NBD-F is demonstrated, requiring 2 min of heating at 60°C, followed by HPLC separation and fluorescence detection.