Abstract
Molecular communication (MC) engineering is inspired by the use of chemical signals as information carriers in cell biology. The biological nature of chemical signaling makes MC a promising methodology for interdisciplinary applications requiring communication between cells and other microscale devices, e.g., smart drug delivery and intelligent surveillance against chemical attacks. The design of communication systems capable of processing and exchanging information through molecules and chemical processes is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field, which holds the promise to unleash the potential of MC for interdisciplinary applications. While MC theory has had major developments in recent years, more practical aspects in designing components capable of MC functionalities remain less explored. Therefore, the main focus of this dissertation is on the design and analysis of signal processing circuits for MC. In particular, this dissertation presents the design and analysis of two chemical-reactions-based microfluidic circuits with binary concentration shift keying (BCSK) and quadruple CSK (QCSK) modulation-demodulation functions and a genetic circuit with controllable pulse generation function.First, the basic characteristics of fluids in microfluidic channels are first analyzed. These include the derivations of the concentration and velocity changes for microfluidic devices with combining and separation channels. Then, a five-level architecture is developed for digital microfluidic circuits along with an introduction to the designs of microfluidic digital AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR, and XNOR gates.
Second, the design of a chemical-reactions-based microfluidic BCSK transceiver is proposed. Based on the newly derived spatial-temporal concentration distributions, the modulated and demodulated signals are mathematically characterized. Moreover, the BCSK transmitter is further optimized in terms of the microfluidic channel length and the restricted time gap between two consecutive input bits.
Third, the design of a chemical-reactions-based microfluidic QCSK transceiver is presented based on the proposed microfluidic logic gates. The proposed microfluidic circuits are theoretically described by deriving the impulse response of advection- diffusion channels, and a general mathematical framework is developed which can be used to analyze other new and more complicated circuits.
Fourth, the design of a genetic circuit with a pulse generation function is proposed. The proposed circuit is consisted of three engineered minimal cells which contain the minimal and sufficient number of molecular components and display Boolean logic functions. The behavior of synthetic minimal cells and cell-to-cell propagation channels are mathematically modeled, which reveals the impact of cell spatial configurations and cell regulatory networks on the peak amplitude of generated pulses.
| Date of Award | 1 Aug 2022 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Yansha Deng (Supervisor) & Ali Salehi Reyhani (Supervisor) |