Cheng Wang

Multiphase ferrofluid flows for micro-particle focusing and separation

Ferrofluids have demonstrated great potential for a variety of manipulations of diamagnetic (or non-magnetic) micro-particles/cells in microfluidics, including sorting, focusing, and enriching. By utilizing size dependent magnetophoresis velocity, most of the existing techniques employ single phase ferrofluids to push the particles towards the channel walls. In this work, we demonstrate a novel strategy for focusing and separating diamagnetic micro-particles by using the laminar fluid interface of two co-flowing fluids-a ferrofluid and a non-magnetic fluid. Next to the microfluidic channel, microscale magnets are fabricated to generate strong localized magnetic field gradients and forces. Due to the magnetic force, diamagnetic particles suspended in the ferrofluid phase migrate across the ferrofluid stream at the size-dependent velocities. Because of the low Reynolds number and high Péclet number associated with the flow, the fluid interface is sharp and stable. When the micro-particles migrate to the interface, they are accumulated near the interface, resulting in effective focusing and separation of particles. We investigated several factors that affect the focusing and separation efficiency, including susceptibility of the ferrofluid, distance between the microfluidic channel and microscale magnet, and width of the microfluidic channel. This concept can be extended to multiple fluid interfaces. For example, a complete separation of micro-particles was demonstrated by using a three-stream multiphase flow configuration.

Acoustic bubble enhanced pinched flow fractionation for microparticle separation

Pinched flow fractionation is a simple method for separating micron-sized particles by size, but has certain intrinsic limitations, e.g. requirement of a pinched segment similar to particle size and limited separation distance. In this paper, we developed an acoustic bubble enhanced pinched flow fractionation (PFF) method for microparticle separation. The proposed technique utilized microbubble streaming flows to overcome the limitations of conventional PFF. Our device has demonstrated separation of different sized microparticles (diameters 10 and 2 μm) with a larger pinched segment (60 μm) and at different buffer/particle solution flow rate ratios (5–25). The separation distances between particles are larger (as much as twice as large) than those achieved with conventional PFF. In addition, the separation position and distance can be adjusted by changing the driving voltage. The robust performance is due to the unique features of the flow field inside the pinched segment. We investigated several factors, including flow rate ratio, total flow rate and driving voltage, that affect the separation performance.