OurFacilities
The Center for Microfluidics and Medical Diagnostics is housed in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana. The Center has extensive facilities and state-of-the-art instrumentation, including an Olympus IX71 inverted microscope and iSpeed High Speed imaging system capable of 33,000 fps record rates, a near-field microscope capable of nanoscale topographic and spectral analysis, stopped-flow spectrometer, ultracentrifuge, DI-multimode Atomic Force Microscope with wet cell and potentiometric capability, two Gamry high speed computer-based electrochemical workstations with software modeling packages for surface characterization of adsorption/desorption, a computer controlled electrochemical processing system capable of controlling and monitoring electroosmotic/electrophoretic colloidal transport, Micrometrics BET apparatus, high performance computational resources, and electrokinetic flow cells, current generators, and analyzers. User facilities include an XPS/Auger surface science facility, Glancing angle x-ray diffraction, Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope, Image analyzer system, Analytical Transmission Electron Microscope, Argon Ion Laser, FTIR, and EPR facilities.
The Center’s staff has full access to the photolithography resources housed on an adjoining floor for creating electrode assemblies on silicon wafers. The total laboratory space available to the Center’s personnel is greater than 4,500 ft2. In addition to standard lathes, saws, drill presses, and grinding devices, the machine shop of the department currently has two CNC Bridgeport milling machines that provide the ability to accurately cut channels in plastic that are less than 0.004 inches wide and less than 0.0005 inches deep. The machine shop also has a new high precision CNC mill that is capable of 0.0015 inch widths and 0.000002 inch depths on plastics, copper, aluminum, ceramics and glass. The CNC mill is remarkably accurate - complex geometry chips can be precision milled to within 1 millionth of an inch of specifications. These mills are used for channel fabrication and standard photolithography techniques are used to prepare electrode patterns.