Tracks: 2018 MSTC Full Conference, Business Related, Emerging Technologies
MSTC 2018 Session 6: EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Wednesday February 14, 2018 ~ 5:00 - 5:30 PM
Henne van Heeren studied chemistry at the University of Utrecht and worked at the University Delft in the area of material science. At Philips Electronics he was responsible as operation manager for a magnetic head / MEMS waferfab. He followed his career as a business development manager at Philips and OnStream. After 17 years in the industry Henne started his own company in 2003 and initiated the enablingMNT group, now having offices in Germany, UK and the Netherlands. He assisted several high tech start-up companies and established companies on industrialization and commercialization issues. He lectured for the NATO on nanotechnology and published over 80 articles and reviews about the development and industrialization of MEMS/MST products, including three guidelines for microfluidic design and manufacturing. Henne initiated a discussion on microfluidic standardization, resulting in a New Work Item proposal to International Standards Organization (ISO).
Integrating microfluidic components from different suppliers into systems often needs ad hoc solutions leading to reliability problems. Cleary industry agreements about interconnections and component formats would simplify matters for designers and producers of microfluidic devices. That goes even more for industry wide supported quality standards. Such agreements will make working with microfluidic devices easier and more reliable; i.e. will lead to plug & play microfluidics. A particular problem in the microfluidic industry is the wide variation in technologies and materials used. Therefore, to make the standards widely applicable, they should be formulated in such a way that they are independent of technology and application. Microfluidic interconnections are often made manually. Especially when many connections are needed, this is a costly activity and risking reliability issues. To promote the introduction of easy to use multiport connectors, the positions, sizes and nomenclature of microfluidic ports were defined. The second important step was defining dimensions of standard microfluidic building blocks to enable easy assembly of the components. The third step taken was defining a classification off microfluidic devices; seen as an essential step towards industry supported quality specifications. There are no published generic test protocols based on proven fault modes to assist the development of more reliable microfluidic products and most of the tools and techniques currently used for failure analysis are not designed to be used with fluids, especially not with liquids. Therefor the microfluidic industry faces the challenge that it needs to define its own testing strategies, methods and reliability models.