Sharif Digital Repository

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... 

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 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... 

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... 

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... 

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 medical science, preparing a high purity sample of certain kinds of cells plays an important role in studying the characteristics and functionality of cells, detecting in vitro harmful pathogens and helping to find ways of preventing and treating diseases that cause cellular disorders in the human body. The goal of this research is to improve the spiral microchannel with stair-like cross section in order to separate white blood cells from whole blood. First, the efficiency of this method was evaluated numerically, using a developed finite element model. Then, the desired microchannel mold was made using the micromiling method, and we fabricated the chip using soft lithography and pasting... 

Microfluidics is a novel technology that brought a revolution in the field of chemistry and biology. This technology allows precise control and manipulation of fluids and particles in sub-millimeter bio-compatible channels. This makes microfluidics a powerful tool to study and examine bio-particles and bio-processes. One of the most prominent areas in microfluidics is the integration of developed measurement tools and devices of the electrical engineering field, with microfluidic chips. The purpose of this thesis is to measure the electrical impedance spectrum of bio-particles with high precision and in a wide bandwidth. These valuable spectrums are useful in many applications such as... 

Microfluidics is a field of science that studies micron-scale characteristics of fluids. In this scale fluids show fascinating behavior far beyond our expectation compared to their large-scale counterparts. One of such peculiar behavior is the mixing of two different liquids flowing inside a microchannel. Due to low Reynolds number, the flow inside such a channel would be dominated by laminar behavior. In this regime mixing of the fluids is only mediated by molecular diffusion which is a rather slow process. In the current thesis, we utilized the rotating ability of optical tweezers to construct an active micromixer for Microfluidics. In order to do this we used birefringent microbeads. The... 

Nowadays, intracellular studies have been widely developed in biological applications. Intracellular analysis requires direct experiments on cells such as cell separation, purification, lysis and DNA extraction. The process of cell lysis and the resulting DNA purification is a crucial step in diagnostic processes. Since, the basis of many genetic studies is the information existed in double-stranded DNA structures.In this project, a microfluidic system is presented which performs integrated chemical cell lysis and DNA extraction. The cell used in this study is L-929. In order to increase cell lysis, the serpentine micromixer in combination with internal and external barriers at the beginning... 

According to today’s medicine progress, the need for improving the medical facilities have been increased. Within the human body, the biomolecules concentration gradient is regulating the cell functions. Biological processes such as immune response, wound healing, and cancer metastasis have been affected by the bimolecular concentration gradient. So understanding the cell behavior in the presence of a chemical gradient can improve the understanding from these biological processes, and also would help in medical researches. On the other hand, finding the appropriate dose of the drugs and in some cases finding the most effective drug is a clinical challenge that made a new field of research in... 

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... 

Separation of particles and cells is one of the most important and practical methods in fields such as biomedicine, medicine and industry. In microfluidics There are various methods for particles and cells separation According to the source of them, they can be categorised as active and passive techniques. Active techniques rely on an external force field. The most important advantage of this method is controlling the force on the particles during the experiment. However, the flow speed is always limited because particles must be exposed to the outer force field for sufficient duration to achieve effective functionality. passive techniques depend entirely on the channel geometry or intrinsic... 

It is of great interest to investigate the effects of different concentrations of chemical species on the behavior of test samples. For example, while developing a new drug, pharmacologists are concerned with the behavior of the live sample against different drug concentrations. Microfluidic systems are the new engineering platforms developed for simplifying these experiments. The main goal of the current study is the design and fabrication of a microfluidic system with the capability of generating a continuous concentration gradient from two species simultaneously on a millimeter-sized test sample. Such a system creates many benefits for researchers using microfluidics technology. Our... 

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cancer cells which shed from the primary tumor, enter circulation and spread cancer all over the body. CTCs give valuable information about cancer and can help diagnosis and prognosis. Hence separating and isolating CTCs from blood is a necessity for cancer therapeutics. CTCs are separated from blood cells by their different physical or biochemical properties. Many groups have attempted different methods for separation of CTCs. Inertial microfluidics is one of the newest approaches in CTC separation technologies which separates CTCs based on their size. Current inertial microfluidic systems containing straight, spiral, serpentine and contraction expansion...