Acoustophoretic microfluidic devices are promising non-contact and high-throughput tools for particle manipulation. Although the effectiveness of this technique has been widely demonstrated for applications based on micrometer-sized particles, the manipulation and focusing of sub-micrometer ones is challenging due to the presence of acoustic streaming. In this article, our study has the aim to investigate and understand which geometrical parameters could be changed to limit the acoustic streaming effect. We numerically study the well-known rectangular cross section of a microfluidic channel and perform a parametric study of the aspect ratio for several particle sizes. The efficiency of the focusing, is explored for different sized particles in order to identify a trend for which the acoustic streaming does not drastically influence the focusing motion of the particles. The possibility to efficiently separate different solid components in liquid suspensions, i.e. the whole blood, is crucial for all applications that require a purified medium such as plasmapheresis or an increase of the concentration of specific subpopulation as the outcome, such as proteomics, cancer biomarker detections and extracellular vesicles separation.
Amorphous silicon-nitrogen (a-Si 1-x N x :H) alloys, thin films, and multilayers deposited by ultrahigh-vacuum plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition were studied and modeled by x-ray reflectivity (XRR) measurements. The analysis of XRR data obtained from the single-layer samples allowed us to calculate the density, thickness, and interface roughness of each layer. To check the deposition parameters, the deviation (t nom − t exp )/(t nom ) of the measured thickness t exp from the nominal thickness t nom was evaluated. Based on these results, a simulation of a multilayer film, obtained by deposition alternating stoichiometric and substoichimetric layers was carried out. It is shown that the best fitting is obtained by introducing into the XRR calculation a thickness distribution with a standard deviation related to the deviation (t nom − t exp )/(t nom ) estimated for the single layers.
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