Sharif Digital Repository

In this research, two important mechanisms were discussed including droplet generation and jumping mechanisms using electro wetting-on-dielectric. For these purposes, the finite element method (FEM) was used to solve the unsteady Naiver-Stokes equation. In addition, the level set method was applied to capture the interface between two phases. In the current study, first, droplet generation in a T-junction fluidic channel device was studied through using electro wetting actuation. The efficacy of electro wetting on the droplet generation frequency as well as droplet diameter is visible in a T-junction fluidic channel since after applying voltages, specified with non-dimensional electro... 

Nowadays cancer is the second major cause of death in the world after cardiovascular diseases and scientists and researchers are making considerable efforts to fight it. Detection and isolation of circulating tumor cells in the blood is of paramount importance as it can be further used to measure the disease severity as well as efficacy of chemical drugs. Magnetophoresis has attracted researchers because of its simplicity, high effectiveness and non-invasiveness. Microfluidic systems have a high potential for implementing conventional biological methods in a microscale for detection, separation and incubation of CTCs, and they also lead to reduction in costs and required samples. Prior to... 

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and despite all the advances in medical science, there isn't any definitive cure for it, yet. Researchers have recently considered the presence of cancer stem cells with the capability of tumorigenesis, invasion, metastasis, self-renewal, etc. as the main cause of inefficiency of cancer treatment. It means current therapies are able to kill the tumor mass, but they are not successful in confront of cancer stem cells and this causes the disease to recur a while after the apparent recovery. To study these specific cells, in this project, first the population of cancer stem-like cells was increased in the cancer cell mass, in other words,... 

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... 

Microfluidic technology is a field of science that deals with the design, fabrication, and experimental tests of small-scale fluid systems and has made great strides over the past decade. As an interdisciplinary field, this growing field of technology has many applications in medicine, diagnostics, chemical analysis, electronics industry, etc. One of the primary applications of the microfluidic devices is the development of " laboratory on-chip (LOC)" tools as point-of-care (POC) diagnostic tools, such as, rapid detection during surgery. A LOC device includes various application modules, sample transfer and preparation modules, separation modules, and detection and analysis modules. The... 

The biocompatibility and chemical stability of boron nitride nanomaterials surpass those of carbon nanomaterials. In addition, boron nitride nanomaterials share the same structure as graphene materials, making them a suitable replacement for graphene in biological applications. In this study, SKOV3 cancer cells were actively targeted using amine-functionalized boron nitride quantum dots that were covalently modified by CD133 antibody. Under the condition that they are not conjugated with antibody, these nanoparticles were also incorporated into the microfluidic device designed to image MCF7 cancer cells. These nanoparticles were produced via solvothermal synthesis in an organic solvent... 

In this research, the ability of artificial intelligence to improve the biosensor performance of a microfluidic system has been investigated. Coulter counter is a microfluidic system that measures the concentration of particles in a fluid using signals obtained from a biosensor. The method of this system is called " Resistive Pulse Sensing (RPS)" method. The pulses in the Coulter counter signals are affected by the number, shape, size and speed of particles passing through the orifice. The pulse of two particles of the same size and different shape in these systems are very similar and this makes it difficult for an operator to distinguish the type of particle. Another disadvantage of... 

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... 

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... 

Separating cells from a mixed sample is a required task in biotechnology and modern medicine, for example to isolate CTC’s that are of interest for doing therapy and diagnosing or doing research. A minute percentage of target cells must be separated from a large amount of unwanted cells. These target cells like CTC’s could be as rare as 1 target cell per millions of unwanted background cells. Hence Microfluidic cell sorting schemes based upon fluorescent labelling, electrophoresis, dielectrophoresis and magnetophoresis have been devised. Microfluidic magnetically-activated cell sorting (MACS) does not need any optical instrument or current source and electrode. By using an electromagnet or... 

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... 

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... 

Nowadays environmental issues are of great importance and one of the most paramount issues is the quality of water, because clean water is vital to our existence. Besides different methods for water purification, water quality testing is a useful and needful tool. Traditional methods for determination of water quality parameters are mainly expensive, time consuming and require highly trained staff. In this study, we have described a centrifugal microfluidic platform (Lab- on – a- CD) for simultaneous determination of different physical and chemical parameters including Nitrite, Free Chlorine and pH. All of the processes from sample injection to detection are integrated on this low-cost and... 

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... 

Microfluidic systems create great development in diseases and drug delivery in various organs of the body. In this study, human pulmonary alveolar cell performance was evaluated from the perspective of the cell culture using a microfluidic system. For this purpose, numerical simulations of the microchip channels flow field are very important to select appropriate models. So in the first step, the flow field and particle deposition were simulated. Then an optimal model was selected based on key parameters such as cell feeding, shear stress exerted on the cell, particles distribution and also the limitations and possibilities for constructing. The numerical results show that the shear stress,... 

Polymerase chain reaction, abbreviated as PCR, is a method of amplifying the number of copies of a desired DNA sequence through special protocols. The rapid advance of microfluidic devices and the emerging concept of digital microfluidics has resulted into the development of digital droplet PCR (ddPCR) systems with their significant uses in the detection of rare mutations, cancer diagnosis, and surveillance. In this study, an integrated ddPCR microfluidic chip alongside its thermoelectric thermal cycler and optical analysis systems have been designed, fabricated and their performance has been tested and evaluated. It was shown that the effect of master mold’s surface quality, the material of... 

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... 

In this study, the dynamics of microparticles in a straight microchannel in the presence of an inhomogeneous oscillating electric field have been simulated by the immersed boundary method in combination with the lattice Boltzmann Navier-Stokes solver and the lattice Boltzmann method for solving the Poisson equation. The effect of the electric field on the location and number of particle equilibrium positions have been examined. In the absence of the electric field, circular particles will migrate to two stable equilibrium positions. The site of these equilibrium positions depends on the particle size and the fluid flow rate and is independent of the particle density. In the case of negative... 

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... 

Today, medical science has come to the conclusion that the best time to start treating a disease is in its early stages. Therefore, the topic of early detection has been widely welcomed in scientific circles. Today, one of the safest methods for early detection in medicine is the study of biomarkers. These biomarkers include CTC, cfRNA, cfDNA, Exosome, etc. For instance, in the discussion of early cancer detection, the US Food and Drug Administration has so far identified two biomarkers, cfDNA and CTC, as the safest markers. The cfDNA marker is also widely used not only in the diagnosis of cancer, but also in the field of sex diagnosis and fetal Down syndrome in the first weeks of pregnancy....