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),
the grey part in the graphic leads from low throughput research results to high throughput high quantity product though
if that is a desiderata for sellable side products. - mostly motivated by helping along
incremental path - bootstrapping - pathways