Tallinn University of Technology

9 September 2024 at 2:00 PM
Rauno Jõemaa, "Development of a Transferable Microfluidic Droplet Generator"

Having already received notable attention in biochemistry and biomedicine, replacement of sample vials in various scientific experiments has been done through microscopic droplets. It can be imagined that every such droplet is several orders of magnitude smaller than a typical sample vial and likewise as much more resource-efficient, containing only a few individual cells, proteins, bacteria, or similar. In the last two decades, research into the microfluidic droplet generation methodology has garnered dominant development principals which largely focus on the droplet production accuracy (droplet size) and rate (droplet count per second) – emphasizing the advantageous scalability of microfluidic technology. Despite well-advancing performance metrics, methods for generating microfluidic droplets have spread relatively slowly compared to the field of microfluidics. Scientific publications have identified possible limiting factors such as lack of standardization and popular applications, as well as costly and difficult-to-transfer facilitating infrastructure and interdisciplinary specialization. Due to this, the given thesis focuses on developing a platform that better facilitates the transferability of microfluidic droplet generation technology. A work which explores improvements in transferability of microfluidic droplet generation through automation, modularization of the portable platform it is based on, and components with wide availability and user support within the subsequent modules. The developed platform uses piezoelectric pressure-based micropumps, pressure sensors, and light-emitting diode-photodiode (LED-PD) droplet sensors to generate water-oil droplets with regulated size and frequency.

Supervisor: Senior Researcher, Dr. Tamás Pardy, Thomas Johann Seebeck Department of Electronics, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

Co-supervisor: Tenured Associate Professor, Dr. Ott Scheler, Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

Opponents:

  • Professor, Dr. András Poppe, Department of Electron Devices, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
  • Professor, Dr. Ørjan Grøttem Martinsen, Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

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