Droplet-based Microfluidics - Enabling Technology Platform for High-throughput Screening of Material Synthesis, Life Science Research and Food Safety Control

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Droplet-based microfluidics, which utilizes immiscible fluids to generate nanoliter-sized droplets, has tremendous potential to revolutionize the quality and throughput of current analytical methods for material synthesis, life science research, food safety control and drug discovery applications, among many others. Employing droplets as test tubes was envisioned several decades ago, but, without suitable techniques to consistently produce uniform droplets and then control them at the single droplet level, this technology has achieved limited traction. Recent advances in microfluidics allow uniform droplets to be generated in channel networks at a frequency of kHz; however, an inability to control individual droplets remains a significant barrier to industrial application. Therefore, this research program is designed to strategically address these challenges by systematically: i) investigating the fundamental physics of droplet transport in large-scale channel networks with realistic operating and geometric conditions, which will lead to advanced fundamental knowledge in this field, practically useful design tools, and passive droplet manipulation functions such as droplet splitting and merging; and ii) developing novel microwave technology for remote and simultaneous sensing and heating over individual droplets using metamaterial -inspired resonators (normally used for wireless communications), which will significantly increase the capacity of droplet-based microfluidics and thus open up new application areas such as detection of nano-sized trace metals in fuel oils. This research program will ultimately establish an enabling technology platform for a variety of applications, which will potentially yield enormous impacts on the broad field of micro/nanodevices. Training highly qualified personnel is one of the fundamental focuses of this program, which will provide a unique multidisciplinary training environment through collaborations between the applicant and leading researchers in the proposed application areas, namely material synthesis, life science research and food safety control.