Microfluidics is the technology of designing and manufacturing devices that channel very small fluid flows. It has applications in biology and chemistry, and requires precise manufacturing and competent fluid physicists. Microfluidics can be integrated with MEMS technology for more complex applications.
Microfluidics is the technology of designing and manufacturing devices capable of channeling very small fluid flows, in the order of microlitres/nanolitres. A microliter and a nanometer are one millionth and one billionth of a liter, respectively. For reference, a drop of water is approximately 25 microliters.
When dealing with such small amounts of fluid, several interesting properties emerge. Properties such as surface tension, which tend not to matter when dealing with the volumes of water we are used to, are starting to dominate the dynamics at these scales. The Reynolds number, which determines the turbulence of the flow, is extremely low at a small scale, meaning that the fluid flow remains virtually laminar. This makes some aspects of microfluidics more convenient and predictable, and others a little more challenging. For example, you can’t rely on turbulence to mix two streams, but must rely only on diffusion, like the cellular machinery in the body.
Systems using microfluidics must be manufactured very precisely. Glass is a common material, but plastic and silicon are also popular mediums. Traditional lithographic techniques can be used to build tiny channels on the surface of computer chip-like devices. All fluids must be relatively pure and free from particles that clog these delicate channels. Microfluidic systems require competent fluid physicists to design and test.
Microfluidics has applications in biology and chemistry. DNA microarrays, which allow biologists to simultaneously perform millions of tests on a particular protein or gene sequence, take advantage of microfluidics. Chemical separation machines can use combinations of centrifuges and microfluidic chips to analyze the chemical composition of a particular substance. They can be used to prepare biological samples for testing. Since most microfluidic chips have designs that cannot be reconfigured, this limits more ambitious applications, but research is ongoing to work around this problem.
An exciting new research area is the integration of microfluidics with MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) technology. By including tiny pumps or electrical devices on a microfluidic chip, it greatly expands the variety of applications. Future microfluidic devices could feature millions of tiny gates that allow users to manipulate flow in complex and useful ways. The government has become interested in using microfluidic chips to test for the presence of biological and chemical weapons.
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