**2.2 Development in application**

*Advances in Microfluidics and Nanofluids*

field of research without any (noticeable) real-world applications compared to microfluidics. Nonetheless, these numbers indicate research activities and popularity of both research fields. Another important aspect of nanofluids is that having superior properties and nano-sized particles, they can be applied to microfluidic systems and devices which can result in improving performance and diversifying the applications of both nanofluids and microfluidic technologies [10, 11]. Nanofluids also span a wide range of potential applications starting from thermal management, energy conversion to nuclear reactor. However, this field is far from developing, exploring its benefits, and exploiting its real applications. The main challenges of nanofluids research are their inconsistent data, unidentified underlying mechanisms for the observed results and maintaining their long-term stability. The progress of the nanofluids research is briefly overviewed in the following

*Microfluidics and nanofluids related publications from 2001 to 2020 (source: Web of science).*

Since both microfluidics and nanofluids fields are well established and reported in the literature and textbooks [2, 3, 6–9, 12, 13], they will not be elaborated further. However, advances, applications and challenges of these technologies are high-

Microfluidic technology is not only attractive to researchers and academics as an emerging research field but also to industrial people as its market is growing rapidly. According to a report by Yole development [14] currently there are 700+ microfluidic related companies worldwide yielding product revenues of around 7 B (billion) dollars in 2017. Also, there are 4500+ published patents only on microfluidic technology-based diagnostics. It was also forecasted microfluidic product

**2**

section.

**Figure 1.**

lighted in this chapter.

**2.1 Global market status**

**2. Advances in microfluidics**

During the past three decades applications of microfluidic technology increased considerably in a broad spectrum of scientific areas from biomedical (known as biomicrofluidics), chemical to MEMS thermal management. The most notable applications include immunoassays (a bioanalytical technique) used in pharmaceutical and clinical laboratories for diagnostics, DNA assays (capturing separation and detection of DNA etc), cell-based assays (known cell culture). A schematic of presentation of various fields of applications of microfluidic technology is provided in **Figure 3**. It can be seen that microfluidics really span a diverse field of applications starting from Lab-on-chip (LOC) to the food and agriculture sectors.

As a pioneering effort by the author nanofluids were studied in microfluidic geometries particularly in droplet-based microfluidics in order to explore new applications of nanofluids [10, 11, 16]. Thus, experimental investigations on the droplet formation and size manipulation of nanofluids in the microfluidic T-junction and flow focusing geometries were conducted. Besides temperature-dependent droplet formation at both geometries, effects of other factors such as presence of

**Figure 2.** *Schematic of classification of microfluidic technology.*

**Figure 3.** *Applications of microfluidic technology.*

nanoparticles in aqueous fluid, depth of microchannel and flow rate on the droplet formation and size manipulation were investigated [10, 11, 16]. Although results are interesting and reveal the potential of nanofluids in microfluidics, more extensive research needs to be performed in this new combined field.
