Four-way valve

A membrane valve on a four-way crossing rather than a straight channel.

What it is for. Controlling a junction where four channels meet, from a single air line.

The catalogue's port data for this cell is wrong. It records zero liquid inlets and zero liquid outlets, while the cell's own source sets an outlet length and liquid channel dimensions. The port counts below are omitted for that reason rather than repeated.

Variants

Sizes below are given in px: units of the design grid these parts were drawn on, where one unit is 0.0076 mm. That is not the printer's pixel. The printer has its own, different pixel size, and nothing on this page is expressed in it — see Hardware and process.

`valve_80px_4way_0`

H.R.3.3 design

Parameters for valve_80px_4way_0
Footprint	180 × 180 px
Membrane thickness	1 layer
Fluid chamber height	3 layers
Air chamber height	6 layers
Channel cross-section	14 px × 10 layers
Layout grid	0.0076 mm per px

Files for this variant

LEFvalve_80px_4way_0.lef1.2 KBDownload
SCADvalve_80px_4way_0.scad2.9 KBDownload

Credit. Gale Lab, University of Utah. The lab's own changes to the public design kit's cell of this name; the public kit (utah-MFDA/h.r.3.3_pdk) has a different design under the same name. Licence: MIT (Copyright (c) 2026 Gale Lab, University of Utah; Copyright (c) 2021 utah-MFDA).

Technical details — where these descriptions come from

Built from a distinct four-way primitive, not from the single-channel valve used by every other valve product.

Every number on this page is read out of the variant's own .scad source at build time, not copied from the old catalogue text. Sizes are given in the layout grid the cells are drawn on — px here is that grid, whose default is stated per variant below. It is not the printer's pixel pitch, which is a different number; see Hardware and process.

What the status words mean

Each variant's status names the printer it is drawn for: the H.R.3.3, the printer the README of the lab's process design kit names.

Tested in the lab with real chemistry	Measured against known chemistry in physical experiments.
Printed and measured on the bench	Printed, and its behaviour measured on the bench matches the design.
A test print	A physical article exists.
Checked in CAD	Modelled and geometry-checked in CAD.
Made by the design software	Ran end-to-end through the pipeline.
An idea	A design on paper or in a wizard spec.
A design for its printer	Drawn on its design kit's grid for the printer the kit is made for, which its status names.

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