How to easily interface peristaltic and rigid microfluidic tubing

How to easily interface peristaltic and rigid microfluidic tubing

During your microfluidic experiments, and more particularly when working with peristaltic pump, you may face an issue when trying to connect a peristaltic/soft-walled tubing (for example in silicone) and a rigid tubing (in PTFE, PEEK…).

To ease the interfacing between these two types of tubes, you can use differents kind of adapter depending on the inner diameter of the peristaltic tubing:

  • Peristaltic Tubing Adapter for 1/16″ OD PTFE Tubing. Compatible with soft-walled tubing from 1.20 mm to 3.80 mm (inner diameter), it ensures a leak-free connection with the minimal internal volume possible. The standard rigid tubing connection is for 1/16″ OD tubing, but you can use any 1/4″-28 fitting for other tubing sizes.

Interfacing soft-walled and rigid tubing

1.20 mm to 3.80 mm peristaltic tubing ID

To interface your peristaltic/soft-walled tubing with PTFE or any other rigid tubing, just select the “small” or “large” adapter based on the inner diameter (ID) size of the soft-walled tubing.

Just connect the soft-walled tubing to the main conical connector (see below, middle). In the meantime, connect the rigid tubing to the fitting and ferrule (left of the image below).

Exploded view of the an adapter connected to a tubing
Exploded view of the adapter

Once done, just screw each part: that’s it!

Final adapter assembly

Are you working with other rigid tubing sizes? You can replace the 1/4″-28 to 1/16″ OD fitting and ferrule for rigid tubing by any other 1/4″-28 connector. Check our Fittings & Connectors collection to find the suitable adapters for your tubing!