On the assessment of microfluidic switching capabilities in NLoC networks

Microfluidic devices have recently attracted the interest of researchers for the number of applications especially in healthcare and controlled drug delivery. However these devices are today not programmable and static in the sense that they perform simple and fixed operations which cannot be changed during device's functioning. To overcome the limitations of traditional microfluidic devices, we have recently proposed the idea of supporting dynamic addressing of different microfluidic elements able to execute various tasks by introducing basic communication and networking functionalities in the microfluidic domain. To enable this vision, we have designed a passive switching device for droplets - that we call microfluidic switch - in which the path followed by a droplet in a microfluidic network can be controlled across a series of junctions, by simply modulating the distance between droplets in the microfluidic channel. In this paper, an experimental testing of a microfluidic switch is presented and compared with results obtained from numerical simulations.

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