Metering and routing of liquid quanta in microfluidic devices.

摘要

Microchemical systems have become increasingly more intricate and complex, and have been used in a wide variety of interesting applications in recent years. However, further advancement of these devices is currently limited by their lack of any significant detection, routing, and scheduling capabilities for the materials moving throughout them. This limited level of control becomes a significant issue when scaling simple, single-channel microfluidic devices to large arrays. The overall goal of this thesis, therefore, is to create and improve several fundamental microfluidic capabilities, including droplet generation, routing, sensing, and scheduling. The integration of these components into larger arrays will also be demonstrated, and will provide a significant step towards more robust and capable heterogeneous microchemical systems.;This thesis describes the development of a number of microfluidic handling techniques, including; (i) the detection of individual liquid droplets using electrical position sensors; (ii) the generation and control over the three major microfluidic segmented laminar flow regimes; (iii) the creation of discrete liquid quanta by entirely chip-driven techniques, including on-chip valves and pumps; (iv) the driving around of those resulting liquid quanta; and (v) the combining of multiple microfluidic peristaltic pumps into a multiplexed arrangement, allowing for many pumps to be controlled by a limited number of external pneumatic connections. These techniques were integrated to create an overall microfluidic droplet routing platform, capable of generating and directing individual liquid elements to arbitrary locations within a large microfluidic A I array, using completely chip-driven actuations. As a testbed application, the microfluidic capabilities developed here were utilized in conjunction with an electrohydrodynamic-jet printing process to generate a high resolution heterogeneous printhead.