Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. A (2004)Microfluidics is the term that is used to describe flow in devices having dimensions ranging from millimetres to micrometres and capable of handling volumes of fluid in the range of nano- to microlitres. In the last few years there has been an explosion of work in this area. There are several reasons for this interest. One aspect is the confluence of technologies, for example, microfluidics and microelectrical mechanical systems (MEMS); another is the number of fields that share an interest in this area: analytical chemistry, high-throughput synthesis, microbiological analysis systems and the many applications that come with portability and field use of the ‘lab-on-a-chip’ concept. The market for such devices was $400M in 2000 and
it is expected to increase by a factor of five by 2005 (Stone & Kim 2001). As may be expected, there is now a considerable amount of literature on various aspects of microfluidics spread over many sub-areas: microfabrication techniques, new designs, interface with MEMS technologies, basic fluid mechanical aspects, etc.
