Development of plug and play microfluidic system

该项目的目的是在令人兴奋和快速增长的研究领域，即微流体，开发一套集成生产力增强工具的原型。微流体位于工程，化学，物理和生物学之间的界面，并通过使流体处理小型化（水龙头滴比典型的微流体系统大数千倍），为我们这个时代的许多关键社会和环境问题提供了激进的解决方案。应用领域是多样化的食品科学，制药和石油化工。“芯片实验室”的发展目标是在护理点实现个性化医疗：一滴血可以在几分钟内分析数千种疾病，并按需生产量身定制的药物。Dolomite是一家开放获取的微流体解决方案提供商，提供标准产品和专业咨询，帮助科学家应对他们在日常研究中面临的挑战。我们认为，科学家应该自由地专注于科学，而不必担心为工作找到合适的工具，并花时间使它们按照他们需要的方式工作。这个项目将使我们的产品更上一层楼。通过开发一套相互连接的微流体产品，提供一套复杂的智能协调能力，可以最大限度地减少设置和重新配置，同时最大限度地提高灵活性和分析。简而言之，该套件的核心将是一个基于android的现代触摸屏界面，提供数据的即时可视化和连接硬件的重新配置-我们称之为“FlowAce”。这将得到一系列硬件模块和传感器的支持，这些模块和传感器通过一组新颖的坚固连接器连接到微流体中使用的微小管道和设备-我们称之为“Multiflux”。为了确保与传统方法的兼容性，还将有一个新的“批量流动”模块，用于采集流体的微观样品并将其放入流动通道中。

The aim of this project is to prototype a suite of integrated productivity enhancement tools inthe exciting and rapidly growing area of research known as microfluidics. Microfluidics lies atthe interface between engineering, chemistry, physics and biology and offers radical solutionsto many of the key social and environmental issues of our time, by enabling miniaturisation offluid handling (a tap drip is thousands of times larger than a typical microfluidic system).Application areas are as diverse as food science, pharma and petro-chemical. “Lab-on-a-chip”developments aim to personalise medicine at the point of care: one drop of blood can beanalysed for thousands of issues within minutes and a tailored drug manufactured on-demand.Dolomite is an open-access solutions provider in microfluidics, providing standard productsand specialised consultancy to help scientists meet the challenges they face in their dailyresearch. We believe that a scientist should be free to focus on science, and not have to worryabout finding the right tools for the job and spending time making them work the way theyneed.This project will move our products to the next level. By developing a suite of interconnectedmicrofluidic products which provide a sophisticated set of intelligently co-ordinatedcapabilities, setup and re-configuration can be minimised whilst maximising flexibility andanalysis.In brief, the core of the proposed suite will be a modern Android-based touch-screen interfacegiving immediate visualisation of data and reconfiguration of the connected hardware– wecall it “FlowAce”. This will be supported by a series of hardware modules and sensors, whichinterconnect to the tiny pipes and devices used in microfluidics through a novel set of robustconnectors – we call them “Multiflux”. To ensure compatibility with traditional methods,there will also be a novel “batch to flow” module for taking microscopic samples of fluids andputting them into flow channels.