Theoretical Modeling of Viscosity Monitoring with Vibrating Resonance Energy Transfer for Point-of-Care and Environmental Monitoring Applications

Abstract

Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) between two molecules in nanoscale distances is utilized in significant number of applications including biological and chemical applications, monitoring cellular activities, sensors, wireless communications and recently in nanoscale microfluidic radar design denoted by the vibrating FRET (VFRET) exploiting hybrid resonating graphene membrane and FRET design. In this article, a low hardware complexity and novel microfluidic viscosity monitoring system architecture is presented by exploiting VFRET in a novel microfluidic system design. The donor molecules in a microfluidic channel are acoustically vibrated resulting in VFRET in the case of nearby acceptor molecules detected with their periodic optical emission signals. VFRET does not require complicated hardware by directly utilizing molecular interactions detected with the conventional photodetectors. The proposed viscosity measurement system design is theoretically modeled and numerically simulated while the experimental challenges are discussed. It promises point-of-care and environmental monitoring applications including viscosity characterization of blood or polluted water.

Hyperspectral Imaging in Environmental Monitoring: A Review of Recent Developments and Technological Advances in Compact Field Deployable Systems

“…Although the majority of recently developed sensors within these fields remain aircraft based [64,67,68,69,70,71], with the advantage of coverage of larger survey areas than typically possible with UAVs, a number of pioneering optical sensors for pollution and particulate monitoring are beginning to emerge. These new devices are providing significant improvements to current monitoring techniques with the introduction of UAV based [72,73], and lower cost portable [74], approaches. The promising success rates of these new devices are providing significant improvements to our understanding of particulate pollutants [75], whilst also highlighting the substantial scope for further development and integration of UAV based hyperspectral sensor systems to this field.…”

Application of Microfluidic Chips in Separation and Analysis of Extracellular Vesicles in Liquid Biopsy for Cancer

“…Microfluidic technologies have aroused a great interest in the biological and medical sciences due to their ability to precisely manipulate small volume liquid samples, reduced operation time, and for their low cost [50]. They have been widely used in biomedical research, point-of-care diagnosis, analytical chemistry, and environmental monitoring [51,52,53,54,55]. They provide fast, efficient, compact solutions for fluid-related problems.…”

Preparation and Characterization of Freely-Suspended Graphene Nanomechanical Membrane Devices with Quantum Dots for Point-of-Care Applications

“…Nanomechanical membranes (NMMs) are important with their impressive precision and sensitivity for the applications in engineering and science, such as; mass, gas, stress, acoustic or viscosity detecting systems, impermeable barrier layer, water purification or memory [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. In addition, NMMs have great potential to be used in novel nanoengineering systems such as; vibrating Förster resonance energy transfer (VFRET) based point-of-care (PoC) device systems or acousto-optic transducer systems [6,[12][13][14][15].…”

“…Mechanics of NMMs subjected to point or pressure loads are analyzed in the literature in terms of the relationship between load and deflection [27,28]. In addition, the effects of load and acoustic pressure on the mechanical behavior of graphene and graphene oxide NMM mechanic behaviors are reported where the deflection distances are defined for clamped thin and thick NMMs [6,[8][9][10]. However, loaded-NMMs are promising to be perfect molecular rulers to measure distances in nanoscale FRET systems.…”

“…However, loaded-NMMs are promising to be perfect molecular rulers to measure distances in nanoscale FRET systems. In addition, NMMs are loaded with donor quantum dot (QD) molecules for realizing VFRET with the acceptor QD molecules coated as another layer under the external sound pressure as a nanoscale acoustic and mass sensor [6,[12][13][14][15]. VFRET promises important future applications as wireless acousto-optical transduction-based nanoscale sensors in diverse areas of technology [6,[12][13][14][15].…”