Abstract

Microfluidic devices are individual chips that manipulate small quantities of fluid to perform, for example, biomedical assays. They provide a compact apparatus for conducting chemical processes while using only micro-liter quantities of potentially expensive chemical reagents. Continued research in microfluidics has brought significant achievements in reducing microfluidic feature sizes, allowing for microfluidic systems to be more densely packed and designed for more complex chemical assays. However, this comes with the need for additional control inputs which require additional external equipment to generate the control inputs. This leads to crowding of external inputs, or an increase in chip volume to accommodate those inputs. External control signals are often pneumatic in nature and directly actuate individual on-chip valves and pumps. Some research groups have investigated the use of integrated on-chip fluidic logic to transform a temporal sequence of pneumatic controls into a larger set of on-chip control signals. Such logic control systems have been realized by the use of 3-terminal, nonlinear valves which serve as the base structure for building logic gates and components. Previous work has focused on creating 3-terminal valves in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidics to take advantage of this material's elastomeric properties. However, PDMS microfluidics comes with the downside of having to fabricate and assemble a handful of individual layers. In the Nordin research group, we have been focused on developing resin-based 3D printing as an effective tool for microfluidic device fabrication. 3D printing is a compelling alternative to PDMS fabrication due to its faster fabrication time, which dramatically reduces the iterative design-fabrication-test loop, which in turn leads to shorter device development timelines. In this thesis, I explore 3D-printing fabrication methods to develop a 3-terminal, nonlinear component that can be used for implementing digital logic. This device will be referred to as a normally open hysteretic valve (NOHV). Using a combination of fluidic resistors and NOHVs, I made a successful inverter logic component, paving the way for development of other logic components necessary for development of integrated on-chip logic control.

Degree

MS

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2026-04-15

Document Type

Thesis

Keywords

microfluidics, 3D printing, logic, microfabrication, lab-on-a- chip

Language

english

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Engineering Commons

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