Application-Specific Microfluidic Networks

Microfluidic devices have applications in various fields. This paper reports a simple approach for designing application-specific microfluidic networks with low effort and time. Here, we also demonstrate how this approach can be utilized to find networks that can perform logic computations based on droplets’ motion inside the network. We applied our approach to find networks that can control the motion of drops for logical computations, i.e., AND (.) gate where a drop will emerge from an arm only if drops enter the network simultaneously and OR (+) where a drop will emerge from an arm, whenever drops enter the network. Finding a device which can do AND (.), OR (+) logic computations might be easy (has been demonstrated) and can be achieved by trial and error. However, for more complex logical operations, trial and error approaches will be time consuming and unreliable. However, the proposed approach can handle these problems quite easily. This approach can also work with multiple drops entering from different source positions into the network to be used in more complex logical operations. We will describe computationally identified device designs for such logic computations in this work.