Candidate
Atulan Zaman
Title
Exploring Microfluidic Design Automation: Thin-wall Membrane Regulator
Supervisor
Derek Rayside
Abstract
Microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip is a growing technology, influential in many areas of engineering. This project focuses on the necessity for better computer aided design tools for this area. Specifically, it focuses on automated synthesis of T-junction components with thin-walled membranes for stability. T-junction is a passive droplet generation component,common in microfluidics which suffers from behavior instability in highly integrated circuits with many components. One way of improving stability is using flexible membranes to mitigate pressure perturbations. This thesis describes the design process of such membranes,so that a model can be used in synthesis of stable T-junctions. Besides description of the microfluidic components, it also discusses the software framework called Manifold, that is used to synthesize microfluidic circuits. To analyze the result of the software framework with the analytical model described, physical circuits were fabricated to validate accuracy of the analytical model and the software. Besides the T-junction, another microfluidics component that was investigated was a Capillary Electrophoresis Channel. This component was also investigated with respect to automated synthesis and verification using the Manifold framework, and the details are discussed.