"DuPont des Matériaux" Award 2009 - Ulrike Lehmann
© 2009 EPFL
Manipulation of magnetic microparticles in liquid phases for on-chip biomedical analysis methods.Thesis n° 4072 (2008). Dir.: Prof. Martinus Gijs.
"For the exemplary work in her Ph.D. thesis and important scientific contributions on the use of magnetic microparticles for biological applications in microfluidic systems"
Manipulation of magnetic microparticles in liquid phases for on-chip biomedical analysis methods
Magnetic actuation offers many advantages: long range of the force, insensitivity to environmental influences and high force densities. In the last years these advantages led to increased interest in using this type of actuation for Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS). In microfluidics and BioMEMS however, magnetic actuation plays only a negligible role, while capillary or electroosmotic forces dominate.
This thesis demonstrates that using magnetic microparticles inside channels or discrete liquid volumes (microdroplets) augments the applicability of microfluidics systems especially with respect to miniaturized bioanalytical procedures. The magnetic microparticles can be used as mobile substrates for the transport of biomolecules while they simultaneously serve as force mediators, which makes it, among others, possible to manipulate aqueous droplets and to introduce macroscopic bioanalytical protocols into microfluidic systems.