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Microfluidics concerns handling and manipulation of minute amounts of fluids; volumes thousands of times smaller than a common droplet. Microfluidics means measuring in microliters, nanoliters or even picoliters. The microfluidics field lies at the interfaces between biotechnology, medical industry, chemistry and MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems). In these markets, microfluidics is a popular research field, which includes study of microfluidic possibilities and design of microfluidics systems.
History of Microfluidics
Microfluidics already started twenty years ago, principally in inkjet printer manufacturing. The mechanism behind these printers is based on microfluidics; it involves very small tubes carrying the ink for printing. The tubes can combine and isolate from each other to change the tone of the colours as they appear on the page. Thanks to microfluidics, inkjet printers became much faster and more precise than the common dot-matrix printers.
Microfluidics: A new Approach
Microfluidics is a disruptive technology that asks people to take a whole new approach if it comes to liquid handling in a laboratory environment. Most of the laboratory processes for high throughput screening are based on titer plate processing: the parallel processing of liquid in wells of a few up to hundreds of microliters.
For years, titer plates have been miniaturized. However, evaporating liquids leads to more and more problems. Additionally, transporting liquids to and from the wells becomes increasingly difficult when decreasing well volume and size.
Microfluidics offers a solution for all these problems. By turning a batch process into a continuous flow process the volume of liquid used for one experiment can be decreased by three orders of magnitude. Therefore, microfluidics results in a significant reduction of the cost per analysis.
Microfluidic Chips