Sharif Digital Repository

This study invewstigates the performance of a coupled microfluidic microbial fuel cell-microbial electrolysis cell producing biohydrogen in presence of shewanella oneidensis MR-1 from excreted oxalate of human metabolic processes. The effect of different parameters such as cell geometry including spiral and straight microchannels, precipitation of nano-particles on anode surface, substrate flowrate and the number of microfluidic microbial fuel cell supporting required power for microbial electrolysis cell were assessed. By anode modification, the maximum current density of 428 W m-3 was obtained which is less than 6-fold of the maximum power density in the cell fabricated by zinc foil. The... 

In present study, bioelectrochemical degradation of oxalate as a substance which its concentration in kidney leads to urolithiasis in a microfluidic microbial fuel cell (MFC) was investigated. In addition, to define a novel application for the microfluidic MFC, measurement and monitoring of oxalate concentration were studied. This application can introduce the system as an implantable medical device for medical usage of urolithiasis and hyperoxaluria diseases. In this work, by designing and fabrication of two MFCs including a large-scale and microfluidic one, and measuring the outlet concentration of oxalate in the large-scale system, the outlet concentration of oxalate at microfluidic MFC... 

Today, with the development of micro-technology in chemical reactions, the use of appropriate systems for the separation and purification of synthesized chemicals seems to be necessary. In this study, the continuous synthesis of bromide-lithium exchange reaction and the separation of organic and aqueous phase products in micro systems was investigated.The method used to construct micro-separator and micro reactor, a laser engraving technique, and thermal bonding of glass to glass.In the first step, the factors affecting the separation of organic and aqueous phase in the capillary micro-separator, such as the width of the capillary, the length of the capillary, the number of capillaries and... 

In recent years, many studies have conducted research about stem cells due to their prominent features such as proliferation and differentiation. By changing the specific parameters of the cellular micro-environment, it is possible to determine the stem cells fate and thereby use them in medical affairs. For this purpose, various devices and methods have been designeds such as microfluidic devices and scaffolds. The microfluidic devices has been especially focuced in the researchs due to their unique features, like the possibility of testing with small amounts of samples, the creation and control of low cost cellular micro-environment and low practical time. Two-dimensional scaffolds made up... 

Droplet microfluidic platform generates monodisperse droplets in a desired size through immiscible multiphase flows inside microchannels. Droplets are individual reactor and can be used for bio(chemical) analyses. Also, for materials fabrication, droplet microfluidics offers a versatile platform for generation of nano- or micro-sized particles and microcapsules that are widely used in drug delivery. In addition to the monodispersity, high-throughput generation is also necessary in many applications. Therefore, droplets must be formed in stable regimes (dripping and squeezing) in the highest possible frequency. In this study, the flow-focusing geometry, which is the most common geometry in... 

Today, the determination and therapy of numerous illnesses, including malignant growth, relies upon the information and assessment of platelets, so blood testing and cell examination is fundamental to survey the movement of disease. The lab on a chip innovation is utilized as an extremely productive device in cell studies. The lab on a chip is used as a foundation and a substrate for making a legitimate stream for cell processes in medication. This innovation is a gadget or framework with millimeters or centimeters aspects like a chip, and it performs research facility handling on a micron-scale. In spite of the fact that it has a few impediments, it has so many values; for example, it... 

Significant advances in biotechnology have led to the emergence of a cost-effective way with less ethical issues to study disease, organ functions, tumors, and their response to drugs besides studying on animals. Microfluidic devices and organ on a chip (tumor on a chip) were introduced to remove those obstacles. Organ on a chip is a powerful tool for studying different types of tissues and simulating diseases, especially cancers, for biological and medical applications. Organ (tumor) on a chip is considered as a smaller scale of the real organ or tumor and it causes to the real-time study of tissues and their functions more accurately. In this study, to fabricate a droplet-based... 

The first attempt of this study was theoretical and experimental investigations of bioelectrochemical processes in microfluidic systems. Besides, novel applications of this technology as a powerful platform for maximum usage of bioenergy were introduced. The feasibility of a microfluidic microbial fuel cell (MFC) as an efficient power generator for production of bioelectricity for implantable medical devices (IMDs) and fabrication of microfluidic microbial electrolysis cell (MEC) for hydrogen medicine were investigated. For the glucose-fed microfluidic MFC, the maximum power density of 5.2 µW cm-2 obtained in this study is 13 fold greater than the power density reported previously for... 

Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a process in which a special piece of a gene is amplified millions of times over a short period. This method has been of paramount importance in different fields of research and has been applied for different applications. PCR requires thermal cycling, or repeated temperature changes between two or three discrete temperatures to amplify specific nucleic acid target sequences. To achieve such thermal cycling, conventional bench-top thermal cyclers generally use a metal heating block powered by Peltier elements or benefit from forced convection heat transfer. Due to the fact that these methods are time consuming, it seems that design and fabrication of a fast... 

Cancer is an abnormal growth of cells which is one of the major cause of worldwide’s mortality. Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) are rare cancer cells released from the primary or metastatic tumors and transported though the peripheral circulatory system and spreads in body and seize healthy organs. Early detection of CTCs can help in overtaking the cancer, hence isolation of CTCs is an essential step for many therapeutics. In spite of its clinical potential, the isolation and detection of CTCs has been a challenging task due to its rare presence amongst other blood cells (as low as 1–10 CTCs per billions of blood cells), similarity to white blood cell in size and also variability in terms of... 

In many microfluidic devices, focusing particles into a narrow stream is usually an essential step prior to counting, detecting, and sorting them. By installation of microfluidic laboratory functions on a rotating disk, new devices called Lab-on-a-disks, which have plenty of advantages in comparison to ordinary Lab-on-a-chips, shape. In this study, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, a Lab-on-a-disk device is designed and fabricated in order to focus particles prior to detecting them by a conventional CD-ROM as a strong optical system. Hydrophoresis method, using slanted obstacles to induce transverse pressure gradients, is utilized to focus particles. In this regard, the... 

Nowadays, cancer, which has been mentioned as the disease of the century, is the second leading cause of death throughout the world, and its incidence is constantly increasing. Isolation of circulating tumor cells is one of the most critical steps in diagnosing and controlling cancer progression. Due to the rarity of cancer cells compared to other cells in the blood sample, the isolation process requires optimal and high-precision devices. With the advent of inertial microfluidics, the ability to control the particles movement, the processing of blood samples as quickly and accurately as possible, and the viability of cells with a high percentage, introduced microfluidic systems as a... 

Nowadays, microgyroscopes are among the most important products of MEMS. The production of small, precise and inexpensive gyroscopes has become possible as the result of recent developments in fabrication technology. In this thesis it is intended to introduce a new method for manufacturing more precise microgyroscopes regarding manufacture facilities. Using this new method, sensitivity and resistance of microgyroscopes are increased against noises which are primarily caused by vibration and rotation about undesirable axes. The rotational movement imposed on the gyro is detected through fluid flow within its torus channel. This transformation facilitates the measurement of the initial motion.... 

According to studies, cancer is the second leading cause of death in the world and millions of people die from this disease every year. Early diagnosis is one of the most important factors in controlling and treating the disease. The ability of circulating tumor cells to diagnose and monitor the disease has led many researchers to focus on studying and researching these cells in recent years. However, due to the fact that the concentration of this type of cells in the blood is very low, their isolation is associated with challenges. Various methods isolate CTCs based on physical, biological and other differences in characteristics. In this study, we investigate performance of a microfluidic... 

A Lab-On-a-Chip (LOC) is a device which can integrate one or many laboratory functions on a small chip with millimeters to few square centimeters in size. LOC is a subset of MEMS devices and known as “Micro Total Analysis Systems” (µTAS) as well. LOC technology is closely related to microfluidics which primarily describes the physics, manipulation and study of minute amount of fluids.In this research we tried to simulate the performance of a microfluidic device for counting blood cells to find main factors of it for design and manufacturing. This research has two main sections, hydrodynamics of fluid inside the microchannels and finding electrical performance of designed Coulter counter for... 

Nowadays, separation and filtration of particles has many industrial applications in biology and medicine. In this thesis, passive microfluidics are designed and simulated which are able to separate and filter particles. Although particles aer generally expected to follow laminar flow streamlines in the absence of external forces, inertial forxes van cause particles to migrate across mictochannels in an accurate and predictable manner. The effect of these forces is invedtigated, and by using previous research, a model is developed to predict these forces. First design is a microchannel with Archimedean spiral which utilizes both inertial forces and Dean flow to separate particles in the... 

Microfluidic technology is a field of science that deals with the design, implementation, optimization, and testing of fluid systems in small dimensions. This technology has made significant progress in various fields in the last decade, especially in medical engineering. As an interdisciplinary scientific field, this growing technology has many applications in medicine, pharmaceuticals, chemistry, and electronic industries. One of the primary applications of microfluidic devices is the development of "lab-on-a-chip" systems as point-of-care diagnostic tools, such as rapid diagnosis during surgery. A microfluidic system includes various functional modules: sample preparation and fluid... 

Cell lysis, as the first procedure of cell pretreatment, is a process that breaks cell membranes open thereby facilitating access to intracellular substances, such as DNA, proteins, and other components for further analysis to diagnose and treat diseases at early stages. Currently, there are several methods for cell lysis at macroscales. However, the time-consuming and expensive procedures as well as the large scal of the system are the main disadvantages of the systems. Recently, microfluidic systems have attracted considerable attention due to advantages associated with automation, integration and miniaturization of biomedical test protocols. Centrifugal microfluidics (Lab-on-a-Disc) is a... 

The main purposes of this project are simulation, design, and fabrication of a microfluidic system based on dielectrophoresis (DEP) exploiting AC voltages for separation of microparticles. Generally, this project can be divided into two parts. First, the engineering section including design and fabrication of microchip, and second biological samples preparation for investigating the system performance. The main advantages of proposed system are eliminating joule heating, a significant problem in insulating based dielectrophoresis systems, overcoming problems related to metal contamination in biological samples, the main problem of conventional dielectrophoresis platforms, and removing... 

In this manuscript, we designed and fabricated a novel integrated microfluidic Kidney Nephron-On-Chip. This chip is able to culture cell monolayers under various fluid shear stresses and divert osmotic pressure gradients while imposing four different concentrations of an injected drug on cells. The multi-layer platform consisting of two bubble-trappers to eliminate all unwanted bubbles from the system, a concentration gradient generator to generate four different concentrations of the injected drug, and a membrane-based cell culture chamber caple of providing renal cells with their in-vivo condition. Using colorimetric techniques, the bubble trapper ability was quantified at flow rates up to...