Erosion of microfluidic channels

Microfluidics is a fast-growing field due to its increasing availability and usefulness, especially in medicine. As such, microfluidic networks that are more and more complex have been designed and fabricated to try and get closer to real-life systems. One key characteristic of living systems is their adaptability to their environment, sometimes with dynamical features depending on external factors such as flow rate and chemicals. This dynamical aspect remains mostly unexplored in man-made systems.

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With Swarnavo Basu, Karen Alim and Gabriel Amselem, we tackle this issue by looking at the erosion in microfluidic networks, experimentally and numerically. The injection of pulses of enzyme in a hydrogel network degrade the walls and enlarge the channels. The smaller channels are eroded such that their hydraulic resistances are getting closer to those of the bigger channels. This results in an homogeneisation of the flow, and thus an enhanced mass transport and improved exchanges at the interfaces.