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5 Designing Meanders
5.5 Conclusion
This chapter proposed a method for automatically generating meander designs. This
method renders the manual drawing of meanders obsolete and, hence, allows to
speed up the design of microfluidic devices. By providing the Meander Designer
as an online tool (accessible through the link http://iic.jku.at/eda/research/meander_
designer/) and generating the meander channels in the open SVG file format, the
tool can be used by a large group of users from the microfluidic domain. The
conducted case studies and the obtained results proved that the tool is capable of
producing absolute fluidic resistance values as well as mixing ratios using relative
fluidic resistance ratios. Therefore, the obtained meanders can be utilized to generate
mixing ratios, to set the ideal operation point of a microfluidic network, or to realize
the resistance of a channel, whose value has been determined using the automatic
dimensioning method proposed in Chap. 4 and [49]. Overall, the flexibility of the
tool to adjust it to any given technological process renders it very employable in any
design process.