Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AutoDropProd (Development of a commercially-viable system for the automatic generation of high-throughput well defined single and double microdroplets)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2018-09-01 al 2020-08-31
The most widely applied method to monitor physical parameters of the droplets such as droplet size and frequency, is the manual measurement. However, it does not advance us to automatization. Other existing methods are based on optical, electrical or even Artificial Intelligence (AI) droplet recognition. However, the low throughput or increased complexity of the systems, is not viable option for industrial applications. Thus, in this project it was designed and built a fully automatic, high throughput, real time droplet detection system which can produce monodisperse droplets and control their size for very long periods of time using a fast response pressure pump. This system solves two major problems concerning microdroplet emulsions – it ensures the conformity of droplet size and produces the emulsions at industrial levels without human intervention, making it the best option for scientific environment as well as for the industrial application.
Having in mind the results of the market research, it was designed and built a high throughput, automatic system to detect, measure and regulate the size of the droplets in microfluidic chip by integrating and synchronizing the strongest parts of several existing systems. It was combined fast optical detection of the droplets together with an automatic calibration based on AI image recognition and a fast feedback loop centered on quick response pressure pump to monitor and produce very uniform size droplets for long periods of time. The system can work with up to 10 kHz of droplet production rates as it is not limited by the processing power of the computer or data transfer speeds. Moreover, this approach does not depend on high speed cameras to photograph the droplets, lowering the cost of the system. The special design of the sample holder allows the use of almost any microfluidic chip making the system more versatile.
The work was disseminated in a workshops, summer schools, two international conferences and by participating in open webinar where it was presented in an oral form to wide audience and recorded. The video of the presentation is open to everyone and it can be found on YouTube platform (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXJ8K1DnVqc&ab_channel=Elveflow). Also, one scientific article was submitted to the international scientific journal as well as several white papers related to the subject have been written, which can be found on the www.elveflow.com webpage.
The commercialization of above-described system will benefit greatly both scientific laboratories (in the fields of pharmacy, chemistry, biology, genetics, etc.), as well as the industries (food, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, chemicals). Firstly, the employment of monodispersed droplets for the experiments will improve dramatically the accuracy of the results. In addition, using monodispersed droplets as a “venue” for the experiments would help to cut the costs dramatically, especially in cases where expensive reagents and chemicals are used. Moreover, the new system will allow to minimize the usage of additives, such as emulsifiers, stabilizers and preservatives as finalized emulsions have longer shelf life. For the industries, the employment of automatic droplet regulation system will give an access to unlimited amounts of monodispersed emulsions, allow to simplify the procedures and to minimize manpower needed, leading to decrease in costs and increase in accuracy. One of the first beneficiaries of the droplet detection and regulation system could be the pharmaceutical industry that could use the system for drug encapsulation. We believe that in medium term (5-10 years) the new medicaments will be produced using microfluidics, that would enable to reduce the costs and have higher value products.