Inertia-enhanced pinched flow fractionation

Anal Chem. 2015 Apr 21;87(8):4560-5. doi: 10.1021/acs.analchem.5b00752. Epub 2015 Apr 9.

Abstract

Separating target particles or cells from a heterogeneous mixture is often critical to many chemical and biomedical applications. Pinched flow fractionation (PFF) is a microfluidic technique that utilizes the laminar flow profile to continuously separate particles by size. We demonstrate that the flow-induced inertial lift force in microchannels can be exploited to significantly increase the particle displacement in PFF due to its strong size dependence. This inertia-enhanced PFF (iPFF) technique can offer at least one-order-of-magnitude higher particle throughput than PFF does at the same sheath flow rate. Moreover, it is able to work effectively in a large range of Reynolds number that spans more than 1 order of magnitude in the current study. In addition, iPFF is found to work most effectively in a rectangular microchannel with a width-to-height aspect ratio of around 2.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Chemical Fractionation / methods*
  • Microfluidic Analytical Techniques*
  • Particle Size