BVM500 Custom Inspection Video Microscope with High Magnification

Bioimager has various designs of custom microscopy products for inspection of parts, devices, equipment from top or bottom views. BVM500 is one of thewas designed to meet special requirements of a client.

Client’s Story

In this specific case, the client requested a movable inspection video microscopy system to visualize some phenomena occur inside a microfluidic chip. Most of microfluidic chips and MEM devices use an inverted biologicla microscope, like that of cell culture, with brightfield, phase contrast, darkfield and fluorescence imaging. There are some special application that a microfluidic device or MEMS is designed in a way that it has some connections and control plugins form the bottom. Thus the observation needs to be done from top, i.e. an upright microscope is required. When an upright industrial is used, then reflected light from top allows easy observation in brightfield, darkfield, polarization, DIC Nomarski and epi-fluorescence modes. In this case a mechanical XY stage moves the device in X, or Y direction and lifts up/down the whole device objective to bring the image in focus.

In some special circumstances of using an upright system for observation of a chip, there are some physical limitations to move the sample in X-Y direction or even because of some physiological reasons, one does not like any perturbation or artificial effects of motion to occur. Meanwhile we like to inspect several locations of the sample, take image or record the video.

Therefore, we need to build a microscopy system which allows observation from top in which the whole imaging module shall be moved around. The system requires a high magnification such as 40x obj lens (400x total magnification).

Imaging Solution

Considering the details mentioned above and the limitation of using a high-magnification lens, a stereoscope is not a good option. Bioimager designed BVM500 with following parts:

a) A heavy duty stand to avoid any shaking or vibration

b) Fine/coarse focus mechanism to use with high magnification lenses

c) Epi-White imaging module

Using epi-white LED illumination, reflection brightfield images can be observed. It is also possible to have polarization, darkfield and fluorescence imaging.

d) High-Power LED Illumination

e) High-Speed Camera with adjustable focus c-mount adapter

The 6.3MP camera in this design has minimum 0.020ms or 20us exposure time.