Electrokinetic Trapping of Microparticles Using Paper-and-Pencil Microfluidics

Controlled synthesis of nonspherical microparticles using microfluidics.

The controlled synthesis of nonspherical microparticles using microfluidics processing is described. Polymer droplets, formed by shearing a photopolymer using a continuous water phase at a T-junction, were constrained to adopt nonspherical shapes by confining them using appropriate microchannel geometries. Plugs were obtained by shearing the polymer phase at low shear rates, while disks were ob...

Dynamics analysis of microparticles in inertial microfluidics for biomedical applications

Inertial microfluidics-based devices have recently attracted much interest and attention due to their simple structure, high throughput, fast processing and low cost. They have been utilised in a wide range of applications in microtechnology, especially for sorting and separating microparticles. This novel class of microfluidics-based devices works based on intrinsic forces, which cause micropa...

The Synthesis and Assembly of Polymeric Microparticles Using Microfluidics

The controlled synthesis of micrometer-sized polymeric particles bearing features such as nonspherical shapes and spatially segregated chemical properties is becoming increasingly important. Such particles can enable fundamental studies on self-assembly and suspension rheology, as well as be used in applications ranging from medical diagnostics to photonic devices. Microfluidics has recently em...

Independent trapping and manipulation of microparticles using dexterous acoustic tweezers

Electrokinetic trapping at the one nanometer limit.

Anti-Brownian electrokinetic traps have been used to trap and study the free-solution dynamics of large protein complexes and long chains of DNA. Small molecules in solution have thus far proved too mobile to trap by any means. Here we explore the ultimate limits on trapping single molecules. We developed a feedback-based anti-Brownian electrokinetic trap in which classical thermal noise is com...