LEAP-HI: Automated Design for 3D Printing of Microfluidic Devices for Healthcare Applications

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Microfluidics uses hair-sized channels in credit card sized devices ("biochips") to analyze fluids for medical tests and drug discovery. Microfluidics has been shown to improve the accuracy, speed, and cost of medical tests and drug discovery, but a key problem with microfluidic devices is that every medical test needs to be custom designed, making microfluidic chips relatively expensive. 3D Printing (3DP) has the potential to make custom devices quickly and inexpensively, but today's design methods are slow and expensive. In electronic microchip design, engineers have developed tools to design chips automatically. This Leading Engineering for America's Prosperity, Health, and Infrastructure (LEAP-HI) project will research similar automated design tools for producing custom microfluidic devices using 3DP. Such software can enable medical technicians and researchers to design and print their own devices by converting functional descriptions to designs, testing the automatically generated designs on a computer, and then printing devices for immediate use. The researched microfluidic devices could become a critical part of healthcare, food safety, environmental testing, and biodefense. The research engages multiple disciplines, including manufacturing, design automation, optimization, biochemistry, and fluid dynamics.The project will research the adaptation of design automation approaches and software already employed by the integrated circuit industry to improve the efficiency of design, validation, and manufacturing of microfluidic devices for healthcare applications. It will focus on algorithms for the efficient design, testing, 3D placement and routing, and handling of biochips that incorporate physical understanding of the 3DP manufacturing process to provide design automation tools for quickly producing microfluidic biochips. In addition, the project will codify best practices for microfluidic 3D printing, which are currently poorly understood by most practitioners, in software. For the individual components used in the component libraries, researchers on the project will generate a deep understanding of how microfluidic components scale and the physics of combining these components. The work will also help users to understand the capabilities and limits of additive manufacturing for use in microfluidics. The approach will be validated by using the tools to design, optimize, fabricate, and test medical chemistry and DNA/RNA analysis devices.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.