Microfluidics/Introduction
What is microfluidics?
[edit | edit source]Microfluidics is the science of fluid flows at the microscopic scale.
Microfluidics mainly deals with artificial systems, but is present in numerous natural systems:
- Trees: ascent of sap in xylem conduits in the trunk (conduit diameter around 30 micrometers), and in leaves (diameter around 50 nanometers).
- Inside us: capillary blood vessels transport liquid (diameter 8 micrometer), lungs pump air in small alveola.
Why do we care?
[edit | edit source]
Microfluidic is involved in present applications:
- Top one: ink-jet printer
Starting applications with a promising market are:
- medical implants (injection of drugs from an embedded pump)
- Lab-on-a-chip: miniature lab to perform biological test such as proteomics, or chemical analysis/synthesis of very exothermic reactions
For research purposes, it provides miniature devices to study small objects.
Bibliography
[edit | edit source]The interested reader will find useful information by consulting the following books and review paper.
- Tabeling, P (2006). Introduction to Microfluidics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-856864-9.
- Bruus, Henrik (2008). Theoretical Microfluidics. Oxford University Press. ISBN-13 978-0199235094.
- Squires, T. M. & Quake, S. R. (2005) Microfluidics: Fluid physics at the nanoliter scale, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 77, page 977
History of this book
[edit | edit source]This book was started May 19th 2008 by Philippe Marmottant CNRS researcher at Grenoble University, France, with the help of Danièle Centanni for the illustrations.