Microfluidics for food, agriculture and biosystems industries

Abstract

Microfluidics, a rapidly emerging enabling technology has the potential to revolutionize food, agriculture and biosystems industries. Examples of potential applications of microfluidics in food industry include nano-particle encapsulation of fish oil, monitoring pathogens and toxins in food and water supplies, micro-nano-filtration for improving food quality, detection of antibiotics in dairy food products, and generation of novel food structures. In addition, microfluidics enables applications in agriculture and animal sciences such as nutrients monitoring and plant cells sorting for improving crop quality and production, effective delivery of biopesticides, simplified in vitro fertilization for animal breeding, animal health monitoring, vaccination and therapeutics. Lastly, microfluidics provides new approaches for bioenergy research. This paper synthesizes information of selected microfluidics-based applications for food, agriculture and biosystems industries.

A bibliometric analysis of micro/nano-bubble related research: current trends, present application, and future prospects

“…The other technique of induced air flotation (Li and Tsuge 2006) for microbubble generation was always considered as an alternative to the dissolved air flotation in dealing with wastewater queries. Furthermore, the micro/nano-bubbles could also be generated under some specific phenomenon with or without other auxiliary technologies (Sassaroli and Hynynen 2007;Neethirajan et al 2011). Insonated by specific ultrasound pulse, the cavitation phenomenon (Sassaroli and Hynynen 2007) could be used to produce the microbubbles, which also offer a novel chance to study the microbubble collapse.…”

“…The diameters of nanobubbles with less than 200 nm are far removed from these of microbubbles (Agarwal et al 2011). When Sebba (1971) first reported that tiny bubbles with diameters of several tens of micrometers differ from their larger counterparts in many important properties, with distinctive characteristics including huge interfacial area, long stagnation time, lower bubble rising speed, and high interior pressure which are different from ordinary bubbles (Zheng et al 2015c), micro/nano-bubble had been widely used in various medical (Lee et al 2015), environmental pollution control (Xu et al 2011), food processing (Sato 2011), marine (Endo et al 2008) and agriculture (Neethirajan et al 2011) applications. In this current study, the global research trends of micro/nano-bubbles are introduced in detail mainly on generation methods, medical applications, and future prospects, which not only focus on the technique of micro/nano-bubbles used in some specific scientific areas but also for the phenomenon of micro/nano-bubbles that is presented in some investigations.…”

Quantitative Studies on PDMS-PDMS Interface Bonding with Piranha Solution and its Swelling Effect

“…Utilisation of Polydimethyl Siloxane (PDMS) as raw material for microfluidic fabrication has been extensively reported in various fields [1][2][3][4]. However, microfabrication of the devices, especially using soft-lithography methods remains a challenge for researchers, particularly those with the necessary sophisticated configuration.…”

Effects of non-Newtonian power law rheology on mass transport of a neutral solute for electro-osmotic flow in a porous microtube

“…1 Applications of microfluidic devices in bio-analysis, 2,3 microelectronics, 4 development of biosensors, 5 controlled drug delivery 6 and drug discovery, 7 micro-separation systems separating biomolecules, 8 ions, 9 neutral solutes, 10 etc., are very promising owing to their high surface to volume ratio and complex fluid flow associated with electrokinetic effects. 11,12 Microfluidic flows occur due to the effect of pressure gradient or electroosmotic effect or combination of both. Heat and Mass transfer analysis in microfluidic flows is significant for operation of all the microfluidic devices and separation systems.…”