High Throughput Microfluidics

微流体学是一个研究领域，它寻求将通常在完整的生物或化学实验室完成的合成和分析任务缩小到一个“芯片”上，类似于电子学如何将过去填满房间的计算机缩小到一个芯片上。微流控技术，也被称为芯片实验室，在过去的几十年里取得了许多进展，显示了在非常小的流体体积下工作的优势，例如低试剂使用量，以及高度可控和统一的反应条件。然而，这些进步对工业的预期影响很小，特别是在化学合成方面，因为这些系统的产量约为毫升/小时。 这项拟议的研究计划寻求利用微滴的优势和新颖的特性，将它们转移到高通量系统中，使其能够每小时生产数十升，并使其具有工业意义。拟议的研究计划将调查并行化的路径，有时称为横向扩展，以增加微流控系统的吞吐量。这涉及到制造许多设备，这些设备都共享相同的输入。为了达到制造这些通道所需的精度，这些通道是大约人类头发大小的管道，将使用与生产计算机芯片相同的微制造技术。微制造在创造高度并行化的电气系统方面有着公认的记录，也将是建立高度并行化的微流体的关键。 微流控合成使用更少的能源和更少的化学资源来生产更高质量的化学品，但产量很小。通过研究高度并行化的微流控技术，该研究项目将使微流控合成达到与工业相关的生产量，并改进化学合成。

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.