Kidney Stones in μ-Reactors

Kidney Stones in μ-Reactors: Design/production of microfluidic devices for induction time experiments and a comparison between laboratory and micro scale reactors

Yu, Tsun (TU Delft Applied Sciences)

Eral, Burak (mentor)
Ibis, Fatma (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Chemical Engineering

2019-11-21

Kidney stones disease is a serious healthy issue in modern society. The amount of patients getting kidney stones are increasing every year. This trend can be caused my numerous reasons like dietary and living conditions. The main point is that the number of kidney stone disease patients need to be lowered. The first step to achieve this is by getting a better understanding of the process of kidney stone formation. The focus will be on calcium oxalate which is the main constituent of kidney stones. In this study we present a microfluidic method to quantify nucleation kinetics of calcium oxalate as function of supersaturation, pH and in the presence of inhibitors (Magnesium, Osteopontin). We have optimized the design of the microfluidic device to minimize the droplet coalescence. Kinetic parameters were obtained through fitting of the probability of nucleation curves measured for over a hundred microdroplets. Nucleation kinetics was seen to increase with an increase in supersaturation, as expected. At pH 6.0 the kinetics dramatically slows down compared to pH’s 3.6 and 8.6. As the inhibitor concentration increases the kinetics will decrease, this is the case for both magnesium and osteopontin.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ed56b44e-1ed7-4c6e-a06c-6b57d47c693e

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Tsun Yu