High Throughput Microfluidics

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Microfluidics is an area of research that seeks to take synthesis and analysis tasks normally done in a full biology or chemistry lab and shrink them down onto a "chip", similarly to how electronics took computers that used to fill a room and shrunk them down onto a single chip. Microfluidics, also called Lab-on-a-Chip, has seen many advancements in the last couple of decades showing the advantages of working with very small fluid volumes, such as low reagent usage, and highly controlled and uniform reaction conditions. However, the promised impact of these advancements on industry, especially in chemical synthesis, has been minimal because the throughput of these systems is in the order of ml/hr.***This proposed research program seeks to take the advantages and novel properties of microdroplets and move them into high-throughput systems that can produce tens of litres per hour and make them industrially relevant. The proposed research program will investigate the path of parallelization, sometimes called scaling out, to increase the throughput of microfluidic systems. This involves fabricating many devices that all share the same inputs. In-order to achieve the accuracy required in fabricating these channels, which are pipes that are about the size of a human hair, the same techniques of microfabrication used to produce computer chips will be used. Microfabrication has a proven track record of creating highly parallelized electrical systems and will also be key in building highly parallelized microfluidics.***Microfluidic synthesis uses less energy and fewer chemical resources to produce higher quality chemicals, but only at low volumes. Through investigating highly-parallelized microfluidics this research program will bring microfluidic synthesis up to industrially relevant production volumes and improve chemical synthesis.*** **