Environmentally responsive polymeric "intelligent" materials: the ideal components of non-mechanical valves that control flow in microfluidic systems

Miniaturization and commercialization of integrated microfluidic systems has had great success with the development of a wide variety of techniques in microfabrication, since they allowed their construction at a low cost and by following simple step-series procedures. However, one of the major challenges in the design of microfluidic systems is to achieve control of flow and delivery of different chemical reagents. This feature is especially important when using microfluidic systems in the development of cell culture systems, the construction of labs on a chip and the fabrication and design of...