2. Microfluidics

Microfluidics is a young field which really emerged as a scientific and technological discipline in the 2000s. As we have seen, microfluidics is of considerable industrial interest, and is expected to be a revolutionary technique in a wide range of applications. In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Technological Review identified microfluidics as "one of the ten technologies that will change the world".

Although a recent development, microfluidics is now a scientific discipline in its own right, while remaining at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology. It can be defined as "the science and technology of systems that manipulate small volumes of fluid (from 10 ^–9 to 10 ^–18 L) in channels the size of a few tens of micrometers"....