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Introduction to
Lab-on-a-chip Systems

EEMN21

Welcome to Introduction to Microfluidics and Lab-on-a-chip Systems. This course gives you an overview of how various chemical and biological lab tests can be miniaturized into lab-on-a-chip systems. The course covers some theoretical background as well as many examples of applications within chemistry, biotechnology and medicine. You also get to try yourself in lab exercises and a short project.

Registered students can access the course contents by logging into Canvas.

What is microfluidics?

Fluids behave differently on the microscale compared to what we are used to on the macroscale. Narrow channels prevent turbulence, instead liquid layers flow side by side as laminas, as in this video.

What is a lab on a chip?

Microfluidics is used to miniaturize lab procedures to the microscale and integrate them into chips, similar to chip-integrated circuits in a computer.

These are some examples:

Organs-on-a-chip (video)
Nanopore DNA sequencing (video)
Droplet by droplet analysis (video)
Moving droplets on electrodes (video)
Lab-on-a-CD (webpage, video)
Influenza detection chip (Scientific American article)

The course

This course contains:

how lab tests can be miniaturized to chips
applications within chemistry, biology and medicine
how liquids behave on the microscale
tools for simulating microfluidics
how microfluidic chips are fabricated
hands on lab exercises where you study laminar flow, diffusion, acoustic forces and droplet generation
research article discussions
a short project with a researcher

More details about the various parts of the course can be found by clicking the sub-pages to the left.