Print Email Facebook Twitter Membrane fouling Title Membrane fouling: Study on fouling inside an Organ on a Chip Author Looman, Miranda (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering; TU Delft Precision and Microsystems Engineering) Contributor Sasso, L. (mentor) Tichem, M. (graduation committee) Boukany, P. (graduation committee) Degree granting institution Delft University of Technology Programme Mechanical Engineering | Micro and Nano Engineering Date 2018-07-09 Abstract Organ on a Chip (OoC) systems are of high interest through its use for medicine testing in a small time scale without the need for animal testing. Membranes used in OoCs form a base to grow cells on and need to be suitable for cell-attachment and porous. Fouling is the 'Achilles heel' in membrane performance. Research shows that as a result of fouling the viability of the skin cells grown in the chip decreased to zero after 3 weeks. If research on organs is to extend and research on cell- or tissue growth will include longer time spans, the influence of membrane fouling with conditions similar to the OoC is an important factor to understand. In this research a microfluidic flow cell is produced and used to explore fouling within the OoC. Static and dynamic fouling experiments are executed on membranes having pore sizes ranging from 0.4 to 5 μm. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images indicate that standard blocking and cake layer formation are dominating fouling mechanisms.Membranes with 1 μm pore size are the most susceptible to standard blocking. Further a decrease in pore area of 0%, 11% and 20% and a decrease in uncovered amount of pores of 27%, 34% and 80% for Glycine, BSA and λ-DNA respectively are measured after one week of fouling. Cake layer formation is seen after fouling for a shorter duration for BSA (one day) than for Glycine (one hour) and a higher concentration of BSA particles is permitted through all tested membranes than Glycine, therefore the conclusion is drawn that BSA causes less fouling than Glycine. Subject MembraneFoulingmicrofluidics To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a6e555ea-0655-4fdd-87aa-f802a0bf1b08 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights © 2018 Miranda Looman Files PDF report_2.pdf 33.65 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:a6e555ea-0655-4fdd-87aa-f802a0bf1b08/datastream/OBJ/view