Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Microfluidics deals with fluids and exploits their physical and chemical properties at the microscale, enabling miniaturized platforms for a wide range of high-precision laboratory operations, point-of-care healthcare applications, and therapeutic treatment. The proposed research program consists of two themes, droplet microfluidics (DM, Theme I) and air microfluidics (AM, Theme II), which share the fundamental roots of microfluidics, but have transformative impacts on distinct application areas. DM employs uniform nanoliter- to picoliter-sized water-oil emulsions as mobilized reactors to revolutionize the level of high throughput analysis that is in high demand in many areas mentioned above. Despite numerous innovations developed over the past two decades, widespread adoption of DM platforms has been hampered by the need for specialist expertise at every design stage, which is beyond end-users. Built upon Dr. Ren's unique proof-of-concept active method for manipulating individual droplets, her team will take a holistic view to develop models describing the system component (e.g. chips, pumps, tubing) and overall dynamics, novel compact lens-less imaging methods for droplet identification, and novel microwave methods for sensing and heating of droplets, to improve the control accuracy and speed (Theme I). These advancements will enable wide adoption by end-users to assemble a system in a play-and-plug fashion by making operational modules including drop generation, merging, splitting, sorting and heating available. AM-enabled soft robotic wearable technology (SRWT) employs air balloon actuators (ABA) that are built in apparels and can be pneumatically inflated/deflated efficiently by a pump through an AM chip with on-chip valves to provide intermittent compression treatment to affected body parts. The significant miniaturization that AM brings in to the wearable system and its control box (major energy consumption and weight contribution component) is triggering a shift in individualized therapy for movement disorders following stroke or spinal cord injury, as well as lymphedema and limb amputation. The challenge is that the needs for ABAs, AM chips and on-chip valves vary dramatically between different applications and there are no design tools available in the field that can guide the development. Dr. Ren's team will fill the field gaps by developing models that can serve as tools for the design optimization and operational control of ABAs, AM chips with on-chip valves (Theme II). This will ultimately lead to affordable, effective, truly wearable soft robotic systems for individual therapeutic treatment. The interdisciplinary nature of the proposed program will prepare the next generation of engineers and scientists with a set of skills that will enable them to embrace real-world problems with a holistic view, be open-minded to cross-disciplinary collaborations and solve problems with scientific and technological backgrounds.