Superheterodyne Microwave System for the Detection of Bioparticles With Coplanar Electrodes on a Microfluidic Platform

Abstract

The combination of microwave and microfluidic technologies has the potential to enable wireless monitoring and interaction with bioparticles, facilitating in this way the exploration of a still largely uncharted territory at the intersection of biology, communication engineering and microscale physics. Opportunely, the scientific and technical requirements of microfluidics and microwave techniques converge to the need of system miniaturization to achieve the required sensitivity levels. This work, therefore, presents the design and optimization of a measurement system for the detection of bioparticles over the frequency range 0.01 to 10 GHz, with different coplanar electrodes configurations on a microfluidic platform. The design of the measurement signal-chain setup is optimized for a novel real-time superheterodyne microwave detection system. In particular, signal integrity is achieved by means of a microwaveshielded chamber, which is protected from external electromagnetic interference that may potentially impact the coplanar electrodes mounted on the microfluidic device. Additionally, analytical expressions and experimental validation of the systemlevel performance are provided and discussed for the different designs of the coplanar electrodes. This technique is applied to measure the electrical field perturbation produced by 10 µm polystyrene beads with a concentration of 10 5 beads/mL, and flowing at a rate of 10 µL/min. The achieved SNR is in the order of 40 dB for the three coplanar electrodes considered.

Optically pumped magnetometer with high spatial resolution magnetic guide for the detection of magnetic droplets in a microfluidic channel

“…When trying to approach the contact-less environment for basic particle interaction, and in particular for droplets containing magnetic particles, mimicking magnetic signals from bioparticles (e.g., action potentials from cells) [10][11][12], the combination of magnetic sensors with microfluidics has proven to be a very interesting pairing for detecting and controlling the functionality of droplets through the interplay with fluid streams [13][14][15][16]; performing these functions without mechanical moving parts, and with little noise generation in the process [17][18][19].…”

UWB-Modulated Microwave Imaging for Human Brain Functional Monitoring

“…In this paper, we propose to explore the possibility of using a novel methodology to wirelessly monitor these low-frequency ( f 1 kHz) signals from the inside of the body using UWB signals. In this sense, a preliminary exploratory work in [23,24] was presented based on the capability of extracting these low-frequency ( f 1 kHz) biological signals as the modulating effect on an interrogating focused incident high-frequency microwave signal (carrier signal). The microwave signal is able to propagate inside (in and out) of the human body, being focused (with a UWB multi-probe geometry [25]) on a specific region of it, and eventually becoming affected (modulated) by the low-frequency ( f 1 kHz) functional biological signals.…”

RHEA: an open-source Reproducible Hybrid-architecture flow solver Engineered for Academia

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The study of complex multiscale flows (Groen et al, 2014), like for example the motion of small-scale turbulent eddies over large aerodynamic structures (Jofre & Doostan, 2022), microconfined high-pressure supercritical fluids for enhanced energy transfer (Bernades & Jofre, 2022), or hydrodynamic focusing of microorganisms in wall-bounded flows (Palacios et al, 2022), greatly benefits from the combination of interconnected theoretical, computational and experimental approaches. This manifold methodology provides a robust framework to corroborate the phenomena observed, validate the modeling assumptions utilized, and facilitates the exploration of wider parameter spaces and extraction of more sophisticated insights.

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