Bringing Microfluidic Seperation, Concentration and Enrichment to Industry

Traditionally microfluidics has been limited to clinical diagnostics and other low throughput applications due to the inherently small dimensions devices are made to. Additionally, sample preparations must generally have strict limitations on particle size ditribution to avoid clogging of channels. The volume of sample able to be processed is also strictly limited due to these geometric constraints. These aspects place severe limitations on how and on what these devices can be used.

In order to broaden the variety of applications that may benefit from a microfluidic approach, a novel design of cascading stages of highly parallelised device arrays can be used. By scaling the device design geometry and running sequential high throughput device blocks, a vastly wider range of particle size distributions can be present in any sample, which will enable the use of microfluidics approaches to environmental sample processing. Any target throughput may also be achieved by increasing/decreasing parallelisation.

The specific goal for this research has been set to process 1000 Litres of treated (tap) water in 24hrs, with the target of interest being Cryptosporidium Parvum (5um). The recovery rate target is > 65%, and concentration factor of at least 1000 x.