Electrokinetic microfluidics

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A lab-on-a-chip (LOC) device is a microscale laboratory on a business-card-sized glass or plastic chip with a network of microchannels. Applying electrical fields along microchannels controls the liquid flow and other operations in the chip. These LOC devices can perform specialized functions as their room-sized counterparts, such as clinical diagnoses of bacteria infection and cancers. The key advantages include dramatically reduced sample and reagent consumption, high speed of analysis, automation and portability. Most biomedical analyses involve multiple biochemical and physical processes of molecules and cells in aqueous solutions. A LOC device therefore must integrate the functions of different bench-top instruments into a single chip, and can perform multiple, sequential microfluidic processes required for realizing the assays on a chip. In order to be able to systematically design LOC devices and control the chip operation precisely, one must understand the complicated microfluidic and nanofluidic phenomena and processes.