Series Editors Preface

From the classical histories of micro- and nanotechnologies, whether referring

to the ideas of Richard Feynman and others concerning machines that make
smaller machines, and so on down to the nanometre scale, that were aired
around 1960, or to the relentless improvement in machining accuracy in both
precision and ultraprecision machining (and, indeed, in normal machining)
clearly traced by Norio Taniguchi, who invented the term nanotechnology in
1974, these technologies are very rmly associated with mechanical devices such
as miniature motors and accelerometers. As the feature size of components
on electronic chips was progressively reduced, very large scale integrated
circuits also came to be seen as part of micro- and nanotechnologiesindeed
Moores law, according to which the number of components on a chip doubles
approximately every 18 months, has come to be seen as epitomizing these
technologiesa link that has been further strengthened as semiconductor
processing technologies used to fabricate the chips are also used to fabricate
microelectromechanical devices (MEMS).
Fluids only later appeared on this stage, in the 1980s, through the necessity
of delivering microscopic quantities of fuel and oxidizer to the miniature
rocket motors used for correcting the courses of spacecraft, and through the
inkjet printers that were attached to digital computers that were by then
already associated with micro- and nanotechnologies. There was also, in the
background, the ideas associated with the biological proof-of-principle of the
possibility of genuine nanotechnology, emphasized by Eric Drexler and others,
which naturally implicated uids as the medium in which biology operates
at the cellular level. More recently, the development of miniature, MEMS-
based medical sensing devices has been powerfully boosted by the advantage
of needing only microliter-sized samples of blood and other clinical uids for
analysis.
In some ways, the apotheosis of the assimilation of uidics into micro- and
nanotechnologies has been the emergence of discrete uidics, which is uidics
based on the manipulation of discrete droplets, now usually called, with an
obvious allusion to digital electronics, digital microuidics.
These developments have only been possible through the careful and
consequential application of a great deal of knowledge carefully accumulated
for quite dierent purposes, and involving several dierent disciplines. Until
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now, the necessary combination of the dierent areas of knowledge was the
prerogative of the relatively small number of pioneers in the eld, but as it
now enters the mainstream, it is very necessary for a much larger community
of practising engineers, scientists and technologists to become acquainted with
areas of knowledge that, in the crowded curricula of modern university physics
and engineering undergraduate courses, are practically relegated to footnotes.
This book is unique in combining in one volume all the knowledge necessary
for launching into cutting-edge research and development in the eld of digital
microuidics. Formerly esoteric subjects such as the physics of droplets and
electrowetting, and the relevant parts of acoustics, are thoroughly treated, so
that the reader will have an excellent grounding in the fundamental theory
underpinning the technology. At the same time, applications are never far
from the mind of the author, who is himself an active practitioner in the
eld, and enrich the entire book, not only the chapters specically devoted
to applications in, for example, biomedicine and chemistry. Several chapters
benet from collaboration with distinguished experts in those topics.
This is a book that will lead the reader from some possibly hazy recollections
of the classical results of scientists such as Laplace and Young, right up to
the rapidly increasing and astonishingly imaginative current developments in
microdroplets and digital microuidics.
Jeremy Ramsden
Craneld University, United Kingdom
December 2007