Systematic Review of Centrifugal Valving Based on Digital Twin Modelling towards Highly Integrated Lab-on-a-Disc Systems

Abstract

Current, application-driven trends towards larger-scale integration (LSI) of microfluidic systems for comprehensive assay automation and multiplexing pose significant technological and economical challenges to developers. By virtue of their intrinsic capability for powerful sample preparation, centrifugal systems have attracted significant interest in academia and business since the early 1990s. This review models common, rotationally controlled valving schemes at the heart of such “Lab-on-a-Disc” (LoaD) platforms to predict critical spin rates and reliability of flow control mainly based on geometries, location and liquid volumes to be processed, and their experimental tolerances. In absence of larger-scale manufacturing facilities during product development, the method presented here facilitates the provision of efficient simulation tools for virtual prototyping and characterization to greatly expedite design optimization according to key performance metrics. This virtual in silico approach thus significantly accelerates, de-risks and lowers costs along the critical advancement from idea, fluidic testing, bioanalytical validation and scale-up to commercial mass manufacture.

Digital Twin: An Oracle for Efficient Crowdsourcing of Research & Technology Development through Blockchain

“…Previous work has outlined how to leverage the benefits of blockchain-based community approaches for science & RTD [58][59][60][61][62][63] in a more general context. This paper exemplifies the digital twin concept for the case of centrifugal microfluidic flow control, which has been experimentally demonstrated and elaborated in much more technical detail elsewhere [64][65][66][67][68][69].…”

Anti-Counterfeit Technologies for Microfluidic “Lab-on-a-Disc” Systems

“…Similarly, previous work on "logical" flow control [76,80] provides a fluidic method to gauge whether the liquid volume in a given chamber falls within a target range; a maximum of incoming liquid volume defined by the dead volume between the location and the bottom of its chamber in a CP-DF siphon valve (Figure 1) can be assured in absence of outflow at ≥ Ω * . Vice versa, a lower volume boundary can be guaranteed for outflow above the same release rate ≤ Ω * .…”

“…Amongst the numerous variations of the theme [44,45,[74][75][76][77][78][79][80], so-called centrifugo-pneumatic (CP) dissolvable-film (DF) siphon valves have recently been highlighted for their superior flow control, operational robustness, manufacturability and configurability towards implementing fluidic largerscale integration (LSI) at the backbone of sample-to-answer automation of parallelized, multi-analyte bioassay panels [80][81][82][83].…”

Secure Air Traffic Control at the Hub of Multiplexing on the Centrifugo-Pneumatic Lab-on-a-Disc Platform

“…Note that the notion of fluidic LSI has previously been used by Quake et al [85,86] in a different context of a pneumatically multiplexed liquid handling on a stationary, elastomeric platform, which is to be distinguished from the centrifugal technology be presented here. For the first time, the approach presented here also factors in experimental tolerances to deliver high predictability for batch-mode operated microfluidic LoaD platforms [68]. In pursuit of this novel objective, a "digital twin" [87,88], i.e., a model-based representation that serves as the virtual counterpart of a physical object or process [68,87,88], is developed for optimizing the fluidic performance, robustness, packing density, and manufacturability of rotationally controlled valving schemes for LoaD platforms.…”

“…For the first time, the approach presented here also factors in experimental tolerances to deliver high predictability for batch-mode operated microfluidic LoaD platforms [68]. In pursuit of this novel objective, a "digital twin" [87,88], i.e., a model-based representation that serves as the virtual counterpart of a physical object or process [68,87,88], is developed for optimizing the fluidic performance, robustness, packing density, and manufacturability of rotationally controlled valving schemes for LoaD platforms.…”