Abstract-A novel microfluidic-integrated microwave sensor with potential application in microliter-volume biological/biomedical liquid sample characterization and quantification is presented in this paper. The sensor is designed based on the resonance method, providing the best sensing accuracy, and implemented by using a substrate-integratedwaveguide (SIW) structure combining with a rectangular slot antenna operating at 10 GHz. The device can perform accurate characterization of various liquid materials from very low to high loss, demonstrated by measurement of deionized (DI) water and methanol liquid mixtures. The measured relative permittivity, which is the real part of complex permittivity, ranges from 8.58 to 66.12, which is simply limited by the choice of test materials available in our laboratory, not any other technical considerations of the sensor. The fabricated sensor prototype requires a very small liquid volume of less than 7 µl, while still offering an overall accuracy of better than 3 %, as compared to the commercial and other published works. Key advantages of the proposed sensor are that it combines 1.) a very low-profile planar and miniaturized structure sensing microliter liquid volume; 2.) ease of design and fabrication, which makes it cost-effective to manufacture and 3.) noninvasive and contactless measurements. Moreover, since the microfluidic subsystem can potentially be detached from the SIW microwave sensor and, afterward, replaced by a new microfluidic component, the sensor can be reused with no life-cycle limitation and without degrading any figure of merit.
Abstract-This paper reports on a miniaturized lab-on-awaveguide liquid-mixture sensor, achieving highly-accurate nanoliter liquid sample characterization, for biomedical applications. The nanofluidic-integrated millimeter-wave sensor design is based on near-field transmission-line technique implemented by a single loop slot antenna operating at 91 GHz, fabricated into the lid of a photolaser-based subtractive manufactured WR-10 rectangular waveguide. The nanofluidic subsystem, which is mounted on top of the antenna aperture, is fabricated by using multiple Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) layers to encapsulate and isolate the liquid sample during the experiment, hence, offering various preferable features e.g. noninvasive and contactless measurements. Moreover, the sensor is reusable by replacing only the nanofluidic subsystem, resulting a cost-effective sensor. The novel sensor can measure a liquid volume of as low as 210 nanoliters, while still achieving a discrimination accuracy of better than 2% of ethanol in the ethanol/deionized-water liquid mixture with a standard deviation of lower than 0.008 from at least three repeated measurements, resulting in the highest accurate ethanol and DI-water discriminator reported to date. The nanofluidic-integrated millimeter-wave sensor also offers other advantages such as ease of design, low fabrication and material cost, and no life-cycle limitation of the millimeter-wave subsystem.Index Terms-biomedical liquid mixtures, nanofluidic, millimeter-wave sensor, transmission line method, W-band.
Abstract-A microwave microlitre binary liquid mixture concentration detection sensor with potential biological analysis is presented. The microwave lab-on-substrate sensor is fabricated using a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) slot antenna. The microfluidic channel encapsulating liquid under investigation is located on top of the antenna slot at a quarter wavelength from the short-circuited end of the SIW. The radiated electric nearfield interaction with the liquid mixture exhibits different relationships between the complex permittivity of the liquid mixtures versus the resonant frequency and return loss, discriminating types and percentages of mixed liquid. The sensor was initially demonstrated with three types of samples: deionised water, methanol and air. A resonant frequency shift of 110MHz was measured to discriminate between air and deionised water while we obtained a 20MHz resonant frequency shift between air and methanol. Furthermore, the sensor was used to assess deionised water-methanol mixtures with methanol fractional volumes of 0 to 1 in 0.2 steps. The microwave-microfluidic sensor is contactless, uses readily available materials, cost effective and offers fast and accurate liquid characterisation.
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