Modular Design of 3D Printed Microfluidics for Bioprocess Applications
Noah Malmstadt,
Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science,
University of Southern California
As 3D printing replaces traditional clean room manufacturing for microfluidic engineering applications, it’s becoming clear that this transition offers not only lower cost and faster design iterations, but also new opportunities for fluidic routing and control that are only possible due to the inherent three-dimensional nature of these systems. Over the past several years, we have developed design principles that take advantage of this three-dimensionality, as well as demonstrating several applications that benefit from this approach. At the core of these design principles is the modularity of microfluidic unit operations. In addition to designing prototypical unit operations such as mixers, splitters, flow focusers, droplet generators, thermal and optical sensors, and world-to-chip interfaces, we have developed systematic approaches to combining these modules into microfluidic circuits with predictable behaviors. This approach can be used to rapidly prototype complex microfludic operations by assembling physically distinct modules as well as to design monolithic microfluidic devices which can be printed in a single run. We have demonstrated the power of this approach by building several micro- and milifluidic systems for bio-analysis and bioprocess applications. These include systems for biomarker diagnostics, automated high-throughput affinity screening, and rapid manufacturing of vaccine lipid nanoparticles. We have also demonstrated how entire systems can be treated as modules, allowing for scaling of bioprocess production lines by massive parallelization.
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