Development of plug and play microfluidic system

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The aim of this project is to prototype a suite of integrated productivity enhancement tools inthe exciting and rapidly growing area of research known as microfluidics. Microfluidics lies atthe interface between engineering, chemistry, physics and biology and offers radical solutionsto many of the key social and environmental issues of our time, by enabling miniaturisation offluid handling (a tap drip is thousands of times larger than a typical microfluidic system).Application areas are as diverse as food science, pharma and petro-chemical. “Lab-on-a-chip”developments aim to personalise medicine at the point of care: one drop of blood can beanalysed for thousands of issues within minutes and a tailored drug manufactured on-demand.Dolomite is an open-access solutions provider in microfluidics, providing standard productsand specialised consultancy to help scientists meet the challenges they face in their dailyresearch. We believe that a scientist should be free to focus on science, and not have to worryabout finding the right tools for the job and spending time making them work the way theyneed.This project will move our products to the next level. By developing a suite of interconnectedmicrofluidic products which provide a sophisticated set of intelligently co-ordinatedcapabilities, setup and re-configuration can be minimised whilst maximising flexibility andanalysis.In brief, the core of the proposed suite will be a modern Android-based touch-screen interfacegiving immediate visualisation of data and reconfiguration of the connected hardware– wecall it “FlowAce”. This will be supported by a series of hardware modules and sensors, whichinterconnect to the tiny pipes and devices used in microfluidics through a novel set of robustconnectors – we call them “Multiflux”. To ensure compatibility with traditional methods,there will also be a novel “batch to flow” module for taking microscopic samples of fluids andputting them into flow channels.