Temperature control system development in microfluidic environment for biological purposes

Microfluidic devices are rising in importance during the last decades. Biomedical science is one of the most important fields of application of these devices, since they are one of the main innovative tools that can help life and medical scientist to solve biological and biomedical problems through the application of engineering tools. For example, the applications at the interface of microfluidics and biomedical sciences have given birth to countless devices and research fields: single cell analysis, circulating tumour cells (CTC) detection, food safety diagnostic, lab-on-chip (LOC), blood analysis, and many others. In particular, there are some kind of microfluidic devices (i.e. foodborne parasitology chips) that requires precise working condition to perform in a correct way. The system developed and presented in this thesis is an embedded system that can assure an accurate temperature control of the microfluidic device , and it is also compatible with the instruments of the Microfluidic Laboratories of the Pazmany Peter Catholic University in terms of size , instruments needed, and power consumptions. The main application for which the system was needed by the staff of the Laboratory is for detection of foodborne parasites by filtration microfluidic devices. The parasite detected in this devices is Trichinella spiralis larvae, which are organisms that can be maintained alive only in a temperature range close to the human body, since they live and grow in the digestive human system and then spread further in other tissues (blood, muscles, lymph). The correct functioning of the embedded system has been tested and verified. It is capable of maintain the temperature of the microfluidic device fixed to a precise temperature for a specific amount of time: both these parameters are decided by the user. This enhances the flexibility, making this embedded system able to work with any microfluidic device that requires a temperature-controlled environment.