Advanced materials based on microfluidic devices

在快速发展的生物和光学工业中，对先进功能材料的需求相当大，因为这些工业需要增强或新颖的材料特性，并且应该精确和简单地可调。聚合物微粒正在成为光子材料、自组装和生物材料（用于组织工程、药物/基因传递和生物分离）等新兴应用的重要组成部分。微流体（在微观尺度上操纵流体）已经成为一种非常有前途的途径，可以产生具有增强特性（单分散性、丰富的形状和多功能）和对材料特性的出色控制的微颗粒。除了材料合成之外，微流体还为模拟/研究生物流体过程（如蜘蛛丝纺丝）提供了巨大的潜力，在这种过程中，在良性条件下产生具有优越机械性能的天然纤维。该研究计划的总体目标是：(1)制造先进的功能性微颗粒（尺寸在0.1到100微米之间的颗粒），用于生物和环境应用的各种用途；(2)开发微型设备（芯片实验室）来研究/模拟生物流体过程，如蜘蛛丝纺丝。

There are considerable demands for advanced functional materials in fast growing biological and optical industries where enhanced or novel material properties are required and should be precisely and simply tunable. Polymeric microparticles are becoming an essential component for emerging applications such as photonic materials, self-assembly, and biomaterials (for tissue engineering, drug/gene delivery, and bioseparation). Microfluidics (manipulation of fluids at a micro scale) has emerged as a very promising route to generate microparticles with enhanced features (monodispersity, rich shape, and multi-functionality) and excellent control over material properties. In addition to material synthesis, microfluidics offers great potential for mimicking/investigating biological fluidic processes such as spider silk spinning, in which natural fibers with superior mechanical properties are generated in benign conditions. The overall objectives of this research program are to (1) fabricate advanced functional microparticles (particles between 0.1 and 100 microns in size) for a variety of uses in biological and environmental applications; and (2) develop miniaturized devices (lab-on-a-chip) to investigate/mimic biological fluidic processes, such as spider silk spinning.