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Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs

Microfluidics continues to bring innovation to the life sciences. It stimulates progress by enabling new ways of research in biology, chemistry, and biotechnology. However, when designing a microfluidic device, designers have to conduct many tasks by hand—resulting in labor-intensive processes. In p...

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Autores principales: Grimmer, Andreas, Frank, Philipp, Ebner, Philipp, Häfner, Sebastian, Richter, Andreas, Wille, Robert
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6316455/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30486446
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi9120625
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author Grimmer, Andreas
Frank, Philipp
Ebner, Philipp
Häfner, Sebastian
Richter, Andreas
Wille, Robert
author_facet Grimmer, Andreas
Frank, Philipp
Ebner, Philipp
Häfner, Sebastian
Richter, Andreas
Wille, Robert
author_sort Grimmer, Andreas
collection PubMed
description Microfluidics continues to bring innovation to the life sciences. It stimulates progress by enabling new ways of research in biology, chemistry, and biotechnology. However, when designing a microfluidic device, designers have to conduct many tasks by hand—resulting in labor-intensive processes. In particular, when drawing the design of the device, designers have to handle re-occurring entities. Meander channels are one example, which are frequently used in different platforms but always have to fit the respective application and design rules. This work presents an online tool which is capable of automatically generating user-defined, two-dimensional designs of fluidic meander channels facilitating fluidic hydrodynamic resistances. The tool implements specific design rules as it considers the user’s needs and fabrication requirements. The compliance of the meanders generated by the proposed tool is confirmed by fabricating the generated designs and comparing whether the resulting devices indeed realize the desired specification. To this end, two case studies are considered: first, the realization of dedicated fluidic resistances and, second, the realization of dedicated mixing ratios of fluids. The results demonstrate the versatility of the tool regarding application and technology. Overall, the freely accessible tool with its flexibility and simplicity renders manual drawing of meanders obsolete and, hence, allows for a faster, more straightforward design process.
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spelling pubmed-63164552019-01-10 Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs Grimmer, Andreas Frank, Philipp Ebner, Philipp Häfner, Sebastian Richter, Andreas Wille, Robert Micromachines (Basel) Technical Note Microfluidics continues to bring innovation to the life sciences. It stimulates progress by enabling new ways of research in biology, chemistry, and biotechnology. However, when designing a microfluidic device, designers have to conduct many tasks by hand—resulting in labor-intensive processes. In particular, when drawing the design of the device, designers have to handle re-occurring entities. Meander channels are one example, which are frequently used in different platforms but always have to fit the respective application and design rules. This work presents an online tool which is capable of automatically generating user-defined, two-dimensional designs of fluidic meander channels facilitating fluidic hydrodynamic resistances. The tool implements specific design rules as it considers the user’s needs and fabrication requirements. The compliance of the meanders generated by the proposed tool is confirmed by fabricating the generated designs and comparing whether the resulting devices indeed realize the desired specification. To this end, two case studies are considered: first, the realization of dedicated fluidic resistances and, second, the realization of dedicated mixing ratios of fluids. The results demonstrate the versatility of the tool regarding application and technology. Overall, the freely accessible tool with its flexibility and simplicity renders manual drawing of meanders obsolete and, hence, allows for a faster, more straightforward design process. MDPI 2018-11-27 /pmc/articles/PMC6316455/ /pubmed/30486446 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi9120625 Text en © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Technical Note
Grimmer, Andreas
Frank, Philipp
Ebner, Philipp
Häfner, Sebastian
Richter, Andreas
Wille, Robert
Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs
title Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs
title_full Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs
title_fullStr Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs
title_full_unstemmed Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs
title_short Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs
title_sort meander designer: automatically generating meander channel designs
topic Technical Note
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6316455/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30486446
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi9120625
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