Transflooder
The idea here is sort of a microfluidic analog to a general purpose electronic computer. Easily re-programmable to do vastly different tasks.
There are several levels here.
Ordered in terms of system throughput:
- Red: Chip integrated mirofluidics … this needs a dedicated chip fab facility
- Orange: (DLP resin) 3D printed integrated mirofluidics (hardcoded dense microfluidic functionality in 3D but produceable locally)
- Yellow: (DLP resin) 3D printed composable "LEGO" (small cubes with ports and certain functions)
- Green: Pipetting (and on chip electrostatic droplet manipulation)
- Blue: (FFF/SLS) 3D printed (or conventionally machined) high througput fluidics
Delineation
There is the concept of a "chemputer" advertised by Leroy Cronin.
- attacking the reproducability crisis in chemistry
- partly motivated by researching the origin of life
- focus on more broad and general chemistry
- focus on a bit bigger quantities
- (wiki-TODO: Check these assumptions more thoroughly.)
This here is likely a bit different with a specific focus on:
- foldamers for nanosystems as quite narrow subspace of chemistry (rather than more general chemistry)
- very low quantities mostly for research and analysis (in the context of a mixed path extremely low product quantities might be sufficient)
- mostly motivated by helping along
incremental path - bootstrapping - pathways