In the past decades, microfluidics emerged as a tool to study fluid flows at small scale with an exquisite control. We recently developed in the lab a tool to integrate hydrogel membranes in situ in microfluidic channel. The internship proposal consists in using these technique to realize microfluidic systems mimicking sap transport in vascular plants, exploiting purely passive, physico-chemical mechanisms, namely evapotranspiration to pump water in a channel, and osmotically driven flows to distibute sugars loaded in an adjacent channel, coupled to the first one by a semi-permeable membrane. The project offers both applied challenges (membrane formulation and integration, control of fluid flows possibly in metastable states at negative pressure, modelling of sap transport in plants and application for digital agriculture) and fundamental perspectives (fundamentals of osmotic transport and osmotically-driven flows, linear transport theory). The internship is funded. No funding for a PhD thesis is granted at this time, but applications to ministerial fundings is possible as the project is inserted in a long-term development perspective in the lab.