Tuesday, December 15, 2015 @ 03:00 pm EST — Tuesday, December 15, 2015 @ 04:00 pm EST | ||||
BIrck 2001 | ||||
High Throughput Screening in Droplet Microreactors Multiphase microfluidics utilizes water-in-oil droplets as vessels for chemical reactions. With volumes of nL-pL, they can provide reaction volumes one million-fold smaller than conventional microplates, enabling new experimental approaches for high-throughput chemistry and biology. In order to leverage these benefits, one must be able to perform conventional fluid handling operations in the droplet format. Multiphase microfluidics is considerably more complex than single phase flow, as it involves multiphase flow interactions, interfacial tension, Laplace pressures, interfacial adsorption, and other phenomena acting in cohort with laminar flow. Rather than work against these phenomena, we exploit them in novel ways in order to perform key fluid handling and sensing operations. This talk will discuss several such technologies being explored in our group: 1) the formation of heterogeneous droplet screening libraries using microfractionation-in-droplets (µFD); 2) Concentrating particles in plugs, exploiting hydrodynamic microvorticesand sedimentation inherent to plug flow; 3) Light-based manipulation of droplets using optofluidictweezers (OFT), a novel technique which uses laser-induced thermocapillarymicrovorticesto trap droplets with µN forces (100,000X larger than traditional optical tweezers); 4) Sorting droplets by size using tensiophoresis, the cross-stream migration of droplets in an interfacial tension (IFT) gradient; and 5) Detecting femtomolesof proteins in droplets using interfacial adsorption phenomena. Experimental and computational methods will be discussed. |
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