The scientific research in droplet based microfluidics focuses on investigations and applications of the interrelation between interface generated forces, hydrodynamics, geometry, and wetting control including superhydrophobicity in micro channel systems with characteristic dimensions between a few hundred microns down to a few hundred nanometers. These systems are fabricated by our microsystems technology group as silicon-glass and all-glass multilayer devices and may include microchannels (20-500 µm depth), capillary channels (1-5 µm), and nanopores (400 nm-20 µm). Transfer to techniques of mass fabrication can be offered in cooperation with external partners.

Actually, a collection of functional nodes for droplet generation, dosing of liquids into droplets, mixing, fusion, phase separation, droplet fusion and optical readout may be customized for integration into microfluidic devices according to the requirements of a given analytical task. Application of principles of electronic design automation (EDA) for the efficient design and realization of these Lab-On-A-Chip systems is one of the main challenges for our future work.

These devices have been successfully applied

• isolation of low abundant micro organisms with delayed or slow growth from soil samples. This work was awarded with the “Thüringer Forschungspreis 2005”,
• cell based assays and drug discovery,
• implementation of on-Chip RT-PCR and
• surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) for quantitative in-line monitoring of drug concentrations in droplet based microfluidic systems.
  
  

Skills

Computational Fluid Dynamics

• Fluent, OpenFoam, SurfaceEvolver
• Geometry generators for etched glass and silicon structures
  
  

Micro Systems Technology and Fabrication

• provided by the micro systems technology group of our department
  
  

Micro Flow Diagnostics

• µ-Particle Image Velocimetry (µ-PIV) including droplet internal flow analysis
• Microscopy and Fluorescence Imaging in micro channels
• Software system for image object analysis and support vector machine based, trainable classification
• confocal Laser Scanning Microscopy for 3D-Analysis of tracer distributions in microchannels
• µ-flow-through spectroscopy
• Nano-flow sensing down to 5 nl/s and flow pulsation analysis with sampling frequencies up to 10 kHz using our own sensor and control unit.
  
  

Thermal and electrical sensing

• On-Chip thermal sensing and control with heat rates up to 20 K/s and 0.1 K precision Thermal Imaging

Deutsch | English