Electrokinetic microfluidics

芯片实验室(LOC)设备是在具有微通道网络的名片大小的玻璃或塑料芯片上的微型实验室。沿微通道施加电场控制芯片中的液体流动和其他操作。这些LOC设备可以像房间大小的设备一样执行专门的功能，例如细菌感染和癌症的临床诊断。主要优点包括大大减少了样品和试剂的消耗，分析速度快，自动化和便携性好。大多数生物医学分析涉及水溶液中分子和细胞的多种生化和物理过程。因此，LOC设备必须将不同台式仪器的功能集成到单个芯片中，并且可以执行在芯片上实现分析所需的多个顺序微流控过程。为了能够系统地设计LOC器件并精确地控制芯片的运行，必须了解复杂的微流体和纳米流体现象和过程。

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.