Selected papers from the third european conference on microfluidics: μFlu'12

The third European Conference on Microfluidics (lFlu’12) was held in Heidelberg in December 2012, under the sponsorship of the Hydrotechnic Society of France (SHF), the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, the University of Toulouse and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. This event has gathered 252 participants from 33 countries. During 3 days, 174 communications have been presented in 16 thematic sessions including Liquid Microflows, Gas Microflows, Microsensors and In-Situ Analytics, Fluidic Microactuators and Micromixing, Microfabrication Techniques for Microfluidic Systems, Convective Micro Heat Transfer, Micro Chemical Engineering, Lab-on-a-Chip, Electrokinetic Microflows, Microdroplets Management, Microflows in Biological Systems and Bioengineering, Multi-Phase Flows in Microsystems, Microflow Visualization, and other topics. Two special sessions have been devoted to Industrial Applications of Microfluidics and to Nanofluidics. The multi-disciplinarity of Microfluidics is highlighted by the variety of works presented in this Conference which confirms also that Microfluidics nowadays finds applications in every industrial sector like biology, medicine,chemical and process engineering, transports, environment, microelectronics. This year the Scientific Committee has selected four papers presented to the Conference for publication in Microfluidics and Nanofluidics; the common topic of these selected papers is the detailed analysis of the interactions at micrometric scale between the fluid and the solid walls of a microdevice by highlighting what happens when the solid surface either presents microgrooves, or gathers electrical charges, or has been submitted to a surface chemical treatment or is simply oscillating.