Shreyas Mandre

University Associate Professor of Fluid-Structure Interaction
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge
       

Algorithm for microfluidic assembly line Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 094503 (2011) PDF

by Schneider, Mandre and Brenner
Fluid Mechanics Materials Science Microfluidics

Abstract:

Microfluidic technology has revolutionized the control of flows at small scales giving rise to new possibilities for assembling complex structures on the microscale. We analyze different possible algorithms for assembling arbitrary structures, and demonstrate that a sequential assembly algorithm can manufacture arbitrary 3D structures from identical constituents. We illustrate the algorithm by showing that a modified Hele-Shaw cell with 7 controlled flow rates can be designed to construct the entire English alphabet from particles that irreversibly stick to each other.