Resonance and Wave Propagation in Microfluidic Devices
Event details
| Date | 01.11.2011 |
| Hour | 14:00 |
| Speaker | Marcel Utz, University of Virginia, USA |
| Location |
CM 1 106
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices represent a rapidly evolving technology with the potential to put complex biochemical assays directly into the hands of forensic officers and medical care providers. Current systems however require a large amount of supporting hardware to control fluid transport. This severely limits the wide deployment of microfluidic technology. We have recently shown that is possible to replace the pneumatically activated valves which are commonly used in microfluidics with passive compliant structures on the chip. These behave like fluidic analogues of passive electronic circuit elements such as capacitors resistors and diodes. In the right combination these elements make the fluidic network frequency-specific allowing to control the motion of fluids by modulating the frequency of a single pressure input. In extension of this idea channels in microfluidic networks can exhibit distributed capacitance and inductance. It will be shown that this leads to behavior analogous to that of electromagnetic waveguides. Pressure waves in the fluid couple to bending waves in the layer covering the channels. We have derived the dispersion relation for such fluidic waves and predict that it is possible to design filters based on standing wave modes with very high frequency selectivity. Preliminary experimental evidence to support this hypothesis will be discussed
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Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Alex Spadoni