Droplet-based Microfluidics - Enabling Technology Platform for High-throughput Screening of Material Synthesis, Life Science Research and Food Safety Control

基于液滴的微流体，利用不混相流体产生纳米级液滴，具有巨大的潜力，可以彻底改变当前材料合成、生命科学研究、食品安全控制和药物发现应用等分析方法的质量和吞吐量。几十年前，人们就设想过将液滴作为试管，但是，由于没有合适的技术来持续地产生均匀的液滴，然后将它们控制在单个液滴的水平上，这项技术的牵引力有限。微流体技术的最新进展使均匀的液滴在通道网络中以kHz的频率产生；然而，无法控制单个液滴仍然是工业应用的一个重大障碍。因此，本研究计划旨在通过系统地战略性地解决这些挑战：i)研究具有实际操作和几何条件的大规模通道网络中液滴传输的基本物理，这将导致该领域的先进基础知识，实际有用的设计工具和被动液滴操作功能，如液滴分裂和合并；ii)开发新型微波技术，利用超材料谐振器（通常用于无线通信）对单个液滴进行远程和同步传感和加热，这将大大增加基于液滴的微流体的容量，从而开辟新的应用领域，例如检测燃料油中的纳米级微量金属。这项研究计划最终将为各种应用建立一个使能的技术平台，这将对微/纳米器件的广泛领域产生巨大的影响。培养高素质的人才是这个项目的基本重点之一，它将提供一个独特的多学科培训环境，通过申请人和主要研究人员之间的合作，在拟议的应用领域，即材料合成，生命科学研究和食品安全控制。

Droplet-based microfluidics, which utilizes immiscible fluids to generate nanoliter-sized droplets, has tremendous potential to revolutionize the quality and throughput of current analytical methods for material synthesis, life science research, food safety control and drug discovery applications, among many others. Employing droplets as test tubes was envisioned several decades ago, but, without suitable techniques to consistently produce uniform droplets and then control them at the single droplet level, this technology has achieved limited traction. Recent advances in microfluidics allow uniform droplets to be generated in channel networks at a frequency of kHz; however, an inability to control individual droplets remains a significant barrier to industrial application. Therefore, this research program is designed to strategically address these challenges by systematically: i) investigating the fundamental physics of droplet transport in large-scale channel networks with realistic operating and geometric conditions, which will lead to advanced fundamental knowledge in this field, practically useful design tools, and passive droplet manipulation functions such as droplet splitting and merging; and ii) developing novel microwave technology for remote and simultaneous sensing and heating over individual droplets using metamaterial -inspired resonators (normally used for wireless communications), which will significantly increase the capacity of droplet-based microfluidics and thus open up new application areas such as detection of nano-sized trace metals in fuel oils. This research program will ultimately establish an enabling technology platform for a variety of applications, which will potentially yield enormous impacts on the broad field of micro/nanodevices. Training highly qualified personnel is one of the fundamental focuses of this program, which will provide a unique multidisciplinary training environment through collaborations between the applicant and leading researchers in the proposed application areas, namely material synthesis, life science research and food safety control.