Sharif Digital Repository

In recent two decades, with developments in micro and nano scale fabricating techniques, use of microfluidic systems is increasing in different fields. How to drive fluid is a hard question because of high pressure drop in micro scale. Different methods has been suggested to solve this problem, among which, electroosmotic pump is preferred because of its advantages. One of the main applications of microsystems is in biomechanical devices like microreactors which are usually working with non-Newtonian fluids. The cross section of these devices are most often close to rectangular shape.Therefor, in this study,Hydrodynamic charactristics and mass transport of non-Newtonian fluids under... 

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... 

Co-culture of different cells is necessary for cancer spheroid formation in preclinical drug tests. It is possible to produce thousands of micro-droplets containing different cells, i.e. microcapsules, in a short time, using droplet microfluidics. However the homogeneity of the cell numbers in the droplets has remained as an unsolved problem.Despite the large amount of experimental efforts to reduce the number of undesirable microcapsules, no one tried to utilize the ease of computer aided simulation for investigating different parameters. In this study, we develop a novel method for capturing cell encapsulation using CFD simulations. The effect of the cell suspension inhomogeneity and... 

Cancer is the second leading cause of death among humans as one of the major human concerns. More than 500,000 people die of cancer each year in the United States alone. Cancer mortality is mainly due to cancer metastasis. Metastasis is the escape of cancer cells from a primary tumor, the circulation of cells in the circulatory system (CTSs), the penetration of/from vessel wall, and the formation of a secondary tumor. It is still not clear how the cells survive in the circulatory system, along with the mechanical pressures and stresses that exist in the body's capillary channals. In this study, a microcirculation model for circulating cells with barriers was designed and constructed by the... 

Based on numerous laboratory and field evidence, low-salinity waterflooding or engineered salinity waterflooding can lead to enhanced oil production. According to the literature, the mechanisms involved in this process can be divided into two general categories: fluid-fluid interactions and solid-liquid interactions. These mechanisms are caused by intermolecular and electrostatic forces at the rock and fluid interfaces. The most important controlling factor of the electrostatic forces is the concentration of ions at/near fluids-rock interface. Therefore, improving the concentration of ions causes a shift in wettability toward a more water-wetting state, eventually leading to increased oil... 

Most of industrial and laboratory processes are faced with liquid-liquid emulsions particularly aqueous-organic ones in their different product streams which determine the need to perform phase separation due to enviromental problems or need to increase the product purity. In this project, due to presence of a water-hexane two phase flow mixture in the outflow of a microractor that performs Lithium-Bromine exchange reaction, a capillary microchip separator has been designed in order to separate water through capillary channel and hexane through main channel outlet using interfacial forces and wettability effects. To obtain a desired phase separation, the pressure drop through main channel... 

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... 

Electroosmosis is the predominant mechanism for flow generation in lab-on-a-chip devices. These microfluidic devices are microscale laboratories on a microchip that can perform clinical diagnoses. Since most biofluids encountered in these devices are considered to be non-Newtonian and the cross section of microchannels in these devices is close to a rectangular shape, In this study, the hydrodynamically and thermally fully developed combined electroosmotically and pressure driven flow of power-law fluids in rectangular microchannels is analyzed. The governing equations are first made dimensionless and then transformed into new ones based on the computational parameters which provide mesh... 

Manufacturing in many industries, such as electronics, petrochemical, automotive, and food, has long relied on continuous approaches, while the pharmaceutical industry has traditionally been processed in batch reactors. Since the beginning of the third millennium, continuous drug synthesis has received attention due to its multiple advantages over batch systems, which include process safety, adaptability, controllability, economic efficiency, scale-up, and enhancing performance. In this project, the pharmaceutical intermediate 1,4-benzodiazepine, which is usable as a precursor of diazepam and flurazepam, is continuously synthesized in a 400 microliters integrated micromixer and microreactor... 

Microfluidics, employing fluids in structures with micrometer dimensions, is an emerging technology that has brought great opportunities to develop various devices including lab-on-a-chip systems. Lab-on-a-chip systems have the advantages of integrating several stages of different analytical methods, application in diverse fields, consumption of small volumes of samples, and portability. One of the crucial applications of lab-on-a-chip devices is sorting cells and biological particles, done by different methods. In separator devices, high separation efficiency and repeatability are critical. When a neutral particle is polarized in a non-uniform electric field, the dielectrophoresis force... 

Nowadays, advanced and inexpensive pre-clinical methods for investigating the effects of anti-cancer drugs are expanding. One of the latest three-dimensional laboratory modeling for evaluating the effects of drugs is the use of tumor-on-chip technology, which actually models the physiological system of the body through three-dimensional scaffolds, multicellular cultures, and shaped vascular systems. In this study, three-dimensional culture of cancer cells was performed in the form of spheroids. A chip of U-shaped microstructures with and without gaps was used to trap cells and form cancer spheroids. We simulated the simultaneous effect of drug and oxygen concentration distribution inside the... 

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... 

In recent years, batch systems were often used in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals. Nowadays, due to the possibility of more optimal conditions in flow systems, such as better mixing and optimal performance of heat transfer and mass transfer, process safety, reduction of retention time, and ease in increasing the scale of the process, the use of flow systems has been expanded. B-hydroxysulfone is a pharmaceutical intermediate in the production of bicalutamide, which is used in the treatment of prostate cancer and is used in many organic and biological processes. The reaction time in batch systems is about 17 to 20 hours, and in the flow system, the retention time has reached about 180-90... 

The advent of microfluidics as suitable environments for culturing cells is associated with some challenges such as shear stresses applied on the cells. In fact, hepatocytes lose their function as exposed to high shear stresses similar to other cell types. Moreover, among all factors needed for cell viability, feeding hepatocytes with adequate oxygen is of great importance due to their high demand for oxygen compared the other cells. In this thesis, different types of cultures including 2D and 3D has been used in order that shear stresses would be in allowed range and provision of hepatocytes with sufficient oxygen concentrations has been ensured as well. In addition to supplying hepatocytes... 

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) isolation from a blood sample has an important value in cancer research and its treatment. Microfluidics provides a great potential for target cell separation from biological samples by using different physical principles. Among the microfluidic cell separation methods, the inertial microfluidic devices are advantageous in handling samples for point-of-care diagnostics due to their simple structure, fast, label-free and low-cost characteristics. In this thesis, first, we designed and investigated the application of a symmetric serpentine inertial microfluidic device for the separation of CTCs from whole blood. For this purpose, numerical modeling was performed... 

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... 

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... 

The microfluidic fuel cell or laminar flow-based fuel cell is a membrane-less fuel cell which typically consists of two electrodes mounted within a T- or Y-shaped microchannel. Aqueous fuel and oxidant are introduced from the two inlets of the channel and flow together side-by-side toward the end of the channel. The Reynolds number in the microchannel is low, and hence viscous forces are dominant over the inertial forces. This causes the anolyte and catholyte form a co-laminar flow inside the microchannel which is required to maintain the separation of the fuel and oxidant and limit the reactions to the appropriate electrodes. In this work, a comprehensive numerical model of the microfluidic... 

Diabetes is one of the most catastrophic diseases in the world. There will be an end to patients’ problems if scientists can invent the artificial pancreas, but there is no implantable sensing core available. All of the sensors used for measuring blood glucose level were based on an electrochemical sensor which will generate a glucose level dependent electric current. The chemical structure of that sensor will deny its usability for in vivo applications. By exploring several biological and electrical literatures we introduced a fully electrical method for sensing the blood glucose level by impedance measurement. In this thesis we introduced a new method for sensing the blood glucose... 

Myocardial infarction (MI) is one of the diseases caused by the temporary or permanent cramp of major coronary arteries. Due to this blockage, blood flow to the heart's myocardial tissue is greatly reduced and finally the person suffered from a Heart stroke (HS). Heart tissue engineering is a promising approach, based on the combination of cells and suitable biomaterials to develop and create heart-like biological substitutes. Since high cardiac cell density, providing metabolic needs like oxygen and nutrients was a challenge. So creation of blood vessel networks within this type of designed tissue has been considered very much.The purpose of this project is to construct scaffolds with...