Lateral-flow particle filtration and separation with multilayer microfluidic channels

Abstract

Separating particles from a suspension and sorting particles into different size ranges are important to many chemical, biological, and bioengineering applications. In this article, a novel lateral-flow particle separation device is presented for continuous particle fractionation from suspensions. This device is based on three-dimensional multilayer poly(dimethylsiloxane) microchannels, which can be fabricated by high-yield and low-cost molding and transfer-bonding techniques. By varying the dimensions of the microchannels in each layer, particles in a suspension can be fractionated into specific layers based on their sizes. Particle separation is successfully achieved in sorting polystyrene microbeads of 1, 10, and 45μm in diameter into different layers. The yield and selectivity of particle separation can be controlled by device geometries such as channel width and length. This novel continuous-flow particle filtration and separation device is expected to find applications in micrototal analysis systems due to its simple fabrication steps, low cost, and capability of particle separation in a deterministic fashion.

A tunable, microfluidic filter for clog-free concentration and separation of complex algal cells

“…A well established field in microfluidics is particle enrichment and fractionation [Beech et al, 2012, Lenshof and Laurell, 2010, Sajeesh and Sen, 2014, with many promising technologies such as filtration [Chen et al, 2014, Maria et al, 1 2015, Jiang et al, 2018], deterministic lateral displacement [Huang et al, 2004, Liu et al, 2010, McGrath et al, 2014, inertial microfluidics [Godino et al, 2015, Hood et al, 2016, Ghadami et al, 2017, and centrifugation [Morijiri et al, 2013, Al-Faqheri et al, 2017. Combinations of the above mentioned methods have also been demonstrated [Marchalot et al, 2014, Jiang et al, 2016, Prabhakar et al, 2015, Kim et al, 2009. Owing to the ease of operation and scalability [Dijkshoorn et al, 2017], industrial applications range from algal harvesting [Barros et al, 2015, Olgae, 2015, where high throughputs are essential, to more conventional lab-on-a-chip applications such as diagnostics [Nam et al, 2016, Warkiani et al, 2015, Maria et al, 2017.…”