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Microfluidics
Microfluidics involves the manipulation of fluids, typically in the microliter to nanoliter range, using channels, chambers, and other structures with dimensions on the micron scale. It uses small-scale fluidic systems and devices to carry out processes related to biological and chemical analysis, diagnostics, drug discovery, and other applications. These systems are leading innovation in areas like point-of-care diagnostics, lab-on-a-chip systems, high-throughput screening, and single-cell analysis.
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Ascential – Empowering Microfluidics Solutions
Ascential has deep expertise in microfluidics, and our team has designed and developed a range of products including microfluidic channels, valves, aspirators, and micro-dispensers. Our experts help you achieve challenging project goals when small volumes and exact conditions are critical through precise fluid flow control. This enables accurate and controlled handling of samples and reagents. Whether your purpose is innovating design for applications like medicine delivery and diagnostics, or you need support making your products more manufacturable, Ascential has the knowledge and resources to help reduce time-to-market and deliver quality outcomes.
Delivering Precision with Fluidic Systems
Each project using microfluidics aims to improve control, precision, and flow. Precision is essential for applications where small volumes and exact conditions are critical, and miniaturization allows for the manipulation of small volumes of liquids.
Ascential navigates your unique project requirements to create aspirators, micro-dispensers, analyzers, reagent packs and consumables to deliver repeatable and scalable results. Our experts can also deliver the ability to precisely control flow rates, volumes, and mixing of fluids to achieve reliable and consistent analytical measurements. They can achieve this for the full spectrum of fluidic volumes, from bulk fluidics down to the picoliter.
Advanced microfluidics often incorporate software integrations. Ascential builds software and embeds firmware for instrument control, data collection, and other applications, supporting your end-to-end project from design to manufacturing to deployment.
Off-the-Shelf or Custom Components
Ascential understands the need for managing costs within your project. Our team works with you and your goals to determine when to integrate off the shelf components and when to design semi or fully custom parts for your unique project. They partner with you to ensure the highest performance, quality, and manufacturability while meeting your cost and timeline targets.
Manufacturability and Serviceability
When designing or redesigning your fluidics system, our experts consider flow rates, manifolds, and dispense volumes as well as the consumables required to achieve precise results. They create systems that are manufacturable by minimizing the number of components and simplifying fabrication processes. For example, they redesigned the fluidics system for one customer to enable processing with one pack while draining a used pack, creating a single manifold with 22 valves and two pumps. By balancing innovation with scalability, Ascential reduces time-to-market without compromising quality.
Ascential also understands the importance of performance and cost over the full lifecycle of your precision equipment and will work to ensure that the system can be maintained over its lifetime to consistently meet demanding requirements and operate reliably for the end user.
Controlled Facilities
Microfluidics devices and processes are highly sensitive to contaminants, which means maintaining a clean environment is critical. When developing microfluidic devices, maintaining environmental controls is important for prototyping and testing phases, ensuring that experimental conditions are consistent and reliable. When you work with Ascential MLS, you get access to the specialized facilities you need in one place, saving time when validating your system requirements.
Ascential has facilities compliant with Biological Safety Level 2, as well as controlled rooms and positive pressure chambers to reduce contamination risks and improve device performance. Our walk-in environmental chambers help to evaluate performance over a wide range of operating conditions, and our expert team can help design a system that maintains your requirements over the full range of conditions that your device will encounter during real world applications.
System Integration
Microfluidics is often just one aspect of a complete system. Ascential works with you to ensure seamless integration of microfluidics components into an overall system to deliver a high performance, end-to-end process.
Ascential has extensive experience combining microfluidics with precision motion control, whether it involves industry standard microplates or completely custom processing elements. Our team can integrate many of the elements commonly associated with processing samples such as centrifuges, incubators, vortexers, plate readers, sample labeling, and more. They can also develop highly customized components for your system to meet your needs.