Abstract
This thesis is based on the work completed during a 3 year (2019 to 2022) collaboration between the University of Montpellier and the pharmaceutical company, MedinCell. The project has addressed the development of optofluidic devices for the eventual application of high-throughput drug solution screening. To achieve this, Aerogel, a highly nano-porous material, has been exploited as it represents an ideal candidate for simple and tailored optofluidic waveguides for such systems.The project has developed from two main axes. The first being the exploration of a novel formation approach using such a material, referred to as an OFAB (Opto-Fluidic Aerogel-Based) module. Through which, aiming to address the limitations that have restricted the application of aerogels in this domain to date. A further perspective has also seen the investigation of aerogel sintering of the formed OFAB modules, to provide increasingly robust devices at a further reduced scale, meaning perspectives for both microfluidic and optofluidic systems.The second axe then explores the formation of a custom manifold system for OFAB integration to enable UV-Vis spectroscopic detection. Multiple fluids with varying analytes and concentrations are then used to demonstrate detection using this system. Alteration of the OFAB modules physical parameters (module length and channel diameter) are then studied to determine their effect on absorbance detection performance. The integrated system is then used to successfully detect drug analyte presence at varying concentrations within a biologically relevant fluid sample, allowing comparison to the current state-of-the-art detection system.