Microfluidics is an expanding research field that lies at the interface of engineering, physics, chemistry and biology and offers promises in the development in a wide range of applications from point-of-care (POC) diagnostics to regenerative medicine, from drug testing to DNA sequencing. The number of publications in the field has been steadily growing in the last two decades and the trend does not show any sign of slowing down. On top of that, the market value generated by microfluidics is expected to quadruple in the time spam from 2013 to 2023: from 1.59 billion dollars in 2013, it is expected to grow to 8.64 billion dollars in 2023. There are however a series of limitations which prevent the full development of microfluidic technology. As it has already been pointed out in many publications in the last decade, the lack of a killer application capable of really making the difference out of the research labs and the academic playgrounds around the world is an impeding factor to the full-scale development of microfluidcs at an industrial level, also due to the lack of industrial standards. A number of authors, though, are of the opinion that the actual concept itself needs to challanged and that a complete re-thinking of the current technological platform should be done in order to make the breakthrough advance allowing a long-standing promising field to finally realise itself.In this work a completely new concept, based on volume-phase-transition smart-hydrogels, is presented and the foundations for a transistor-like technological platform are laid. A strong focus is therefore based on the basic element itself, i.e. volume-phase-transition smart-hydrogels, and on the possible ways that it might be integrated in microfluidic systems. Furthermore, basic circuits that lay the foundations for a logic system are presented together with other applications that replicate some elementary functions in microelectronics, such as oscillators. Finally, integration of logic gates as well as basic circuits is presented, in order to lay the foundations for chemical integrated microfluidic circuits.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:32755 |
| Date | 19 January 2019 |
| Creators | Pini, Cesare |
| Contributors | Richter, Andreas, Cuniberti, Ginaurelio, Technische Universität Dresden |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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