Microfluidics

What is microfluidics?

Microfluidics is a new technology that enables liquid manipulation on the micro scale. It emerged in the early 1990’s originally to enhance the analytical performance of chemical systems, but was later found to offer a whole set of advantages resulting in its adoption in many fields, including biological analysis, chemical synthesis, electronics cooling, and optics. Now, less than twenty years after its inception, microfluidics is at the core of a whole new technology, known as “Lab-on-a-Chip”, that made possible, on palm-sized devices, processes that conventionally required bench-size equipment. A few examples of these processes include immunoassays, Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), and cell cytometry.

Research interests

The research interests of the microfluidics lab at the Mechanical Engineering Department at the American University of Sharjah are:

• Better understand the basics and fundamentals of driving and manipulating liquids in microfluidic devices.
• Develop new, low cost microfabrication techniques to produce reliable microfluidic devices with the limited capabilities of typical research labs in developing countries.
• Explore implementing microfluidics technology in new biomedical applications that can benefit from the advantages it offers.