W.S.G. Isaac Newton

The topic of this internship was the analysis and design of a new clamping mechanism for the development of a functioning microfluidic test setup that is currently used by Benchmark. The purpose of this test setup is to obtain a flow over a microfluidic chip that was designed by the UT start-up company Occam Dx which can be used to analyse a variety of diseases in a human liquid sample using biosensors. The main goal of the research is to design, assemble, and test a new clamping mechanism that is able to seal the chip with an adjustable and controllable force. A list of requirements for such a device was created and various concepts were produced as a result of a morphological diagram. After the assembly of the final design, it is subjected to a variety of tests in order to verify if the requirements were satisfied. In addition to the design of the clamp, insights were given into the relation between the applied force and the resulting flow that is measured.

I found the internship at the Design Engineering department of Benchmark Almelo quite enjoyable. I liked the open working atmosphere at the company and the fact that you could approach someone at their desk if you had a question regarding their expertise. It was also nice to have a lot of freedom while working on the final design for the test setup. If I wanted to test or prototype something I could just make a 3D printed prototype to see if it works. This really helped with eliminating errors that you normally would not detect when working in a software.