Fabrication and Flow Characterization of Microfluidic Devices

Year: 
2013

Project Description

Microfluidic devices enable the precise control of very small volumes of fluids (smaller than 1 microliter).  The field of microfluidics has attracted much interest in recent years due to the countless applications it offers to biology and chemistry.  Microfluidic devices have been constructed using a variety of methods; many of them derived from the Integrated Circuit industry.  In the Meinhart Lab we develop and fabricate such devices for a variety of applications, such as chemical detection, microchip cooling, and cell sorting.  This project involves microfluidic control of nanoparticles and molecular mass transport for chemical detection purposes, particularly of narcotics in bodily fluids.  The intern's project will involve building and operating a generic microfluidic device, the basic building block for all the research that we do.  Students will then have the opportunity to use the devices they fabricated in an experiment, where they will learn how to use microscopy techniques to capture photographs and movies from their devices, and use these data as part of their analysis to visualize the fluid flow in the device.

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