Keunhwan Park

Optimal lamellar arrangement in fish gills

Significance It is generally assumed that shapes encountered in nature have evolved in a way as to maximize the robustness of a species. Nevertheless, given nature’s notoriously complex designs, it is often unclear what is being optimized. The lamellar pattern of fish gills is one of the few cases in which optimization in nature can be well defined. We demonstrate that the lamellar pattern of fish gills has been optimized, such that fish display interlamellar spaces of similar dimension regardless of body mass or species, thereby revealing the primary evolutionary pressure on fish gills. This natural optimization strategy demonstrates how control of the channel arrangement in microfluidic devices enhances heat and mass transfer. Fish respire through gills, which have evolved to extract aqueous oxygen. Fish gills consist of filaments with well-ordered lamellar structures, which play a role in maximizing oxygen diffusion. It is interesting that when we anatomically observe the gills of various fish species, gill interlamellar distances (d) vary little among them, despite large variations in body mass (Mb). Noting that the small channels formed by densely packed lamellae cause significant viscous resistance to water flow, we construct and test a model of oxygen transfer rate as a function of the lamellar dimensions and pumping pressure, which allows us to predict the optimal interlamellar distance that maximizes the oxygen transfer rate in the gill. Comparing our theory with biological data supports the hypothesis that fish gills have evolved to form the optimal interlamellar distances for maximizing oxygen transfer. This explains the weak scaling dependence of d on Mb: d ∼ Mb1/6.

Visualization and minimization of disruptive bubble behavior in ultrasonic field

Although ultrasonic technology has been successfully adopted for semiconductor cleaning, a recent trend of extreme miniaturization of patterns calls for a novel process that can remove contaminant particles without damaging nanoscale patterns. Unstable bubble oscillations have been hypothesized to cause such surface damages, and here we show direct visualization results that a high acoustic pressure induces bubble instability leading to pattern damages. As a remedy for the conventional ultrasonic cleaning scheme, we introduce a novel cleaning system using dual transducers, in which one transducer generates bubbles with a high acoustic pressure in an acoustically isolated sub-chamber and the other drives the oscillation of bubbles around the cleaning area at a low acoustic pressure. The system is shown to achieve a high cleaning efficiency for submicron-sized particles while significantly suppressing the disruptive bubble instability thereby reducing the detachment of firmly attached nanoparticles. Comparison of the adhesion force of the firmly attached nanoparticles and the yield strength of nanopatterns allows us to anticipate that this scheme is capable of reducing damages of nanopatterns on semiconductor wafers and photomasks.

Hygrobot: A self-locomotive ratcheted actuator powered by environmental humidity

A hygroresponsive actuation system crawls on a moist surface using aligned nanofibers that quickly swell and shrink. Microrobots that are light and agile yet require no artificial power input can be widely used in medical, military, and industrial applications. As an actuation system to drive such robots, here we report a biologically inspired bilayer structure that harnesses the environmental humidity energy, with ratchets to rectify the motion. We named this actuator-ratchet system the hygrobot. The actuator uses a hygroscopically responsive film consisting of aligned nanofibers produced by directional electrospinning, which quickly swells and shrinks in lengthwise direction in response to the change of humidity. The ratchets based on asymmetric friction coefficients rectify oscillatory bending motion in a directional locomotion. We mathematically analyzed the mechanical response of the hygrobot, which allowed not only prediction of its performance but also the optimal design to maximize the locomotion speed given geometric and environmental constraints. The hygrobot sterilized a trail across an agar plate without any artificial energy supply.

Visualization of Disruptive Bubble Behavior in Ultrasonic Fields

The bubble oscillations play an important role in ultrasonic cleaning processes. In the ultrasonic cleaning of semiconductor wafers, the cleaning process often damages micro/nano scale patterns while removing contaminant particles. However, the understanding of how patterns in semiconductor wafers are damaged during ultrasonic cleaning is far from complete yet. Here, we report the observations of the motion of bubbles that induce solid wall damage under 26 kHz continuous ultrasonic waves. We classified the motions into the four types, i.e. volume motion, shape motion, splitting or jetting motion and chaotic motion. Our experimental results show that bubble oscillations get unstable and nonlinear as the ultrasonic amplitude increases, which may exert a large stress on a solid surface raising the possibility of damaging microstructures.