Design automation based on fluid dynamics

This article was accepted and presented at the 9th International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2017).Microfluidic devices provide researchers with numerous advantages such as high throughput, increased sensitivity and accuracy, lower cost, and reduced reaction time. However, design, fabrication, and running a microfluidic device are still heavily reliant on expertise. Recent studies suggest micro-milling can be a semi-automatic, inexpensive, and simple alternative to common fabrication methods. Micro-milling does not require a clean-room, mask aligner, spin-coater, and Plasma bonder, thus cutting down the cost and time of fabrication significantly. Moreover, through this protocol researchers can easily fabricate microfluidic devices in an automated fashion eschewing levels of expertise required for typical fabrication methods, such as photolithography, soft-lithography, and etching. However, designing a microfluidic chip that meets a certain set of requirements is still heavily dependent on a microfluidic expert, several days of simulation, and numerous experiments to reach the required performance. To address this, studies have reported random automated design of microfluidic devices based on numerical simulations for micro-mixing. However, random design generation is heavily reliant on time-consuming simulations carried out beforehand, and is prone to error due to the accuracy limitations of the numerical method. On the other hand, by using micro-milling for ultra-fast and inexpensive fabrication of microfluidic devices and Taguchi design of experiments for state-space exploration of all of the geometric parameters, we are able to generate a database of geometries, flow rates, and flow properties required for a single primitive to carry out a specified microfluidic task

Standardizing design performance comparison in microfluidic manufacturing

Microfluidic devices published in literature today lack sufficient information for automating the physical design process. Moreover, the constantly changing landscape of manufacturing and technological requirements poses a large problem in the physical design automation space. In this talk, we discuss some of the methodologies and standards formulated by CIDAR at BU and CARES at UC Riverside that allow not only allow the researchers in the physical design automation space to share and compare their results but also provide means for capturing the Specify, Design and Build lifecycle in microfluidic design

Integration of performance metrics into microfluidic design automation

Accepted manuscripthttps://www.iwbdaconf.org/2019/docs/IWBDA19Proceedings.pd

The Nature of Business Process Redesign in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in a Developing Country Context

As important drivers of the economy, Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)in developing countries need to adopt innovative business practices to deal with their volatile economic environment. Business process (BP) redesign provides transformational capabilities that can improve the performance of SMEs. However, research in BP redesign has concentrated on large organisations, mostly in developed economies, resulting in methods that are not suitable for SMEs in developing countries. This has resulted in limited adoption of BP redesign among these enterprises. SMEs have unique challenges such as resource poverty, lack of business skills, and different business goals and practices. Thus, they require BP redesign methods tailored to their needs. To contribute to addressing this gap, this paper explored the issues raised by SMEs in BP redesign initiatives in a developing country context. Through exploratory interviews with managers of SMEs, the findings show that the SMEs are characterised by severe limitations in resources, and uncertain business environment. Thus, they engage in agile, iterative, systemic, and context-sensitive process change practices. As part of a larger design science research (DSR) project, these findings serve as a foundation for designing and developing a BP redesign method suitable for SMEs in developing country contexts

mLSI design with MINT

Fluigi is a microfluidic design framework that allows researchers to realize abstract descriptions of liquid flow relationships automatically as physical devices and corresponding control software. Its goal is to provide synthetic biology researchers with the tools to use microfluidics for novel computation, discovery, and test applications. A critical component of this work-flow is MINT, a format for describing the microfluidic components and the connectivity of the control and flow layers in the microfluidic device. This work describes MINT and where it falls in the larger Fluigi software flow in design mLSI system for Synthetic Biology

Function-driven, graphical design tool for microfluidic chips: 3DuF

The use of microfluidic chips for applications in biology to reduce the cost, time, and difficulty of automating experiments, while promising, has proven to have barriers to entry. In particular, the cost of the equipment required for manufacturing techniques like soft lithography, the difficulty in designing functional microfluidic chips, and the time associated with manufacturing them have made rapid production for prototyping and iterative design difficult. Our lab’s microfluidics design flow is capable of automating much of the design process of microfluidic chips using the paradigm of defining them as primitives placed on a layout grid and exporting standard formats for use in fabrication. 3DuF, a design tool that allows the user to carry out the placement and connection of primitives through a browser-based GUI, simplifies the design process to specifying the primitives through parameters and using a pointer to connect them with channels. But this approach assumes that the designer knows exactly what physical dimensions the primitives need for the chip to perform adequately for experiments, which may not be the case if sufficient literature or a fluid dynamics expertise are not present. By communicating with DAFD, our lab’s currently in-development database and model-fitting framework, 3DuF will be able to define microfluidic primitives for placement on chip layouts not only through physical dimensions, but also by specific performance metrics desired of the primitives’ functions, which will result in automatically generated dimensions for those primitives. This will allow chip design through the simple paradigm of using a GUI to place primitives and connect them with channels, while also making a useful definition of those primitives for the designer’s needs less reliant on their fluid dynamics expertise

MINT - Microfluidic Netlist

Fluigi is a microfluidic design framework that allows researchers to realize abstract descriptions of liquid flow relationships automatically as physical devices and corresponding control software. Its goal is to provide synthetic biology researchers with the tools to use microfluidics for novel computation, discovery, and test applications. A critical component of this work-flow is MINT, a format for describing the microfluidic components and the connectivity of the control and flow layers in the microfluidic device. This work describes MINT and where it falls in the larger Fluigi software flow

Deconstructing Feminist Positions in Unigwe’s “Possessing The Secret Of Joy” and Aidoo’s “The Girl Who Can”

For many years, African women have been blaming men for the inferior position of the female gender in African societies. In this blame game, the patriarchal and cultural stipulations of societies are not left out since they present the male gender as superior. This observation is emphasised by the myriads of texts on feminism which largely present discourses that highlight the roles of the male gender and patriarchy in perpetuating female otherness. In doing so, the females are portrayed as mere victims who do not play any active roles in this ordeal and are therefore exonerated from blame. This notwithstanding, a close study of events in patriarchal societies and the evolving contemporary current of thought in feminist domains questions the portrayal of women as helpless victims of patriarchy. By using the theories of feminism and deconstruction and by focusing on the themes and language of the stories, this paper seeks to unearth some patterns in Unigwe’s “Possessing the Secret of Joy” and Aidoo’s “The Girl Who Can” which speak to the involvement of women as agents of patriarchy. It also argues that some of the time too, men can be victims or subjugates of patriarchy in the African context. The paper concludes that the fight against patriarchy remains the lot of both genders and not in the blame game