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Design and Fabrication of Microfluidic System to Produce Microgel for Drug Delivery Application

Shieh, Hamed | 2019

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 51665 (06)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Bastani, Dariush; Saadatmand, Maryam; Eskandari, Mahnaz
  7. Abstract:
  8. Due to the increasing need of use of drugs and insufficient efficiency of conventional methods, drug delivery systems has gathered a lot of interests. There are different systems existing for controlled drug delivery, among which is implementation of hydrogel microparticles (microgels) as carriers with high potential. The most important factor in these systems is size distribution of drug-carrying microgels and a narrow size distribution leads to a controlled and suitable release. Due to unique characteristics of microfluidic systems, significant focus has been placed on them nowadays for production of microgels with suitable morphology and narrow size distribution. Therefore, in this study a microfluidic system has been designed and fabricated for on-chip generation of spherical microgels for drug delivery application. Since generation of spherical microgels with uniform shape and size distribution is of great importance for drug delivery, the focus in this study was on the production of spherical microgels suitable for drug delivery application by separation of droplet generation and gelation steps. Finally, this goal was achieved by shielding the aqueous phase with an oil phase. Moreover, using the fabricated system in this study highly monodispersed droplets (with coefficient of variation less than 5%) in range of 90 to 190 micrometers were produced. The performance of the system on production of monodispersed droplets and shielding the aqueous phase was proved by capturing images of droplet generating process and image analysis of captured images. Furthermore, the proposed system is capable of generating droplets in a variety of flow rates using two different geometries (step and flow focusing geometries) on one chip. This capability will broaden the range of flow rates in which the chip can generate droplets. Also, the step geometry produced droplets with smaller diameter and narrower size distribution (coefficient of variation less than 2%) compared to flow focusing nozzle (coefficient of variation less than 5%). The ability of the proposed design in generating droplets using two different geometries on one chip and creating proper shielding of aqueous phase in both geometries is proposed and investigated for the first time. Finally, spherical alginate microgels (without drug loading) having a diameter in range of 100 micrometers has been produced using the fabricated chip, in order to prove the ability of fabricated chip in generation of microgels
  9. Keywords:
  10. Microfluidic System ; Microgel ; On Chip System ; Shielding Calculations ; Drug Delivery

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