Open Microfluidic Technologies For Fundamental And Applied Studies Of Human Health And The Environment

This dissertation discusses the applications for open microfluidics in emerging technologies for studying human health and the environment. Open microfluidics is a sub-field of microfluidics that is quickly gaining traction for technologies across biology and the environment. The open nature of the microchannels enables flexibility to the user for adding or removing components and makes it simple to use. Chapter 1 introduces how microfluidics has traditionally been used and provides a background of open microfluidics and the common methods used to fabricate devices. Chapter 2 evaluates rapid injection molding, a more economical version of traditional injection molding, for open microfluidic cell-based technologies. Minimum dimensions and dimension accuracy are investigated for applications with fluorescence imaging. Chapter 3 highlights a novel method for generating droplets in an open microfluidic device that utilizes natural hydrostatic pressure and therefore does not require pumps or external equipment to generate the droplets. Additionally, potential use cases are presented for applications in droplet manipulation, patterning, splitting, and fusion. Chapter 4 presents a layer-by-layer hydrogel patterning method made possible by spontaneous capillary flow. An open microfluidic rail-based device is used to pattern entire layers of hydrogels for biological applications in tissue engineering, organoid development, and 3D cell culture. Chapter 5 presents a novel method for capturing airborne particles using microdroplets and open microfluidic channels for shuttling the collected sample across the device. The work presented here demonstrates fundamental open microfluidic principles for droplet generation and fabrication as well as how open microfluidics can be applied to diverse fields of study such as hydrogel patterning and environmental sampling.