Development of High-Throughput Microfluidic Impedance Spectroscopy Platform for Analyzing Microdroplets in Droplet Microfluidic System

This thesis presents the development of a high-throughput microfluidic impedance spectroscopy platform for electrically detecting analyzing impedance measurements of non-contact and label free microdroplets. This microfluidic impedance spectroscopy platform gives valuable information of the size and contents of the microdroplets in general and particularly of cells encapsulated within droplets.

Impedance spectroscopy is a common method for analyzing dielectric properties of particles with respect to the stimulating frequency. Microfluidic based impedance spectroscopy can analyze up to micro size particles. However, droplets based microfluidic impedance spectroscopy systems for analyzing cells encapsulated within droplets have been rarely developed.

However, to develop a high-throughput system, a novel sensitive high-throughput droplets based microfluidic impedance spectroscopy platform for analyzing cells encapsulated with droplets at different levels concentrations at throughput of 140 Hz which has not been reported in the literature yet.

The device sensitivity was demonstrated using chlamydomonas reinhardtii cells. Two throughputs (17 and 140 droplets/s) for four level of cells concentrations were discriminating and compared. The maximum deviation in the acquired data for both cases was 6.9%. At 10% difference of cells encapsulated within droplets, the device was capable of discriminating and distinguishing different between the encapsulated microdroplets.