Surface Acoustic Wave Microfluidics
Surface acoustic wave driven microfluidic systems are currently receiving large interest within the lab-on-a-chip community, owing to their numerous applications in microscale fluid and particle manipulation. The physical understanding of the underlying mechanisms is however lacking, limiting technological advancements. Our work, in collaboration with Dr. Rune Barnkob and Prof. Christian Kähler at Universität des Bundeswehr Munich, focused on exploring the fundamental physical phenomenon in these devices. We presented the first rigorous computational study of such devices, benchmarked with 3D measurements of particle trajectories obtained via the state-of-the-art General Defocusing Particle Tracking (GDPT) technique. The development of a Lagrangian velocity based numerical formulation, and subsequent validation with experiments, revealed hitherto unidentified surprising and novel physics and resolved ambiguities in the acoustofluidic literature concerning the direction and the magnitude of the acoustic streaming flows.
References:
References:
- R. Barnkob, N. Nama, L. Ren, T. J. Huang, F. Costanzo, and C. J. Kähler, Acoustically driven fluid and particle motion in confined and leaky systems, Physical Review Applied, Vol. 9, pp. 014027, 2018.
- N. Nama, T. J. Huang, and F. Costanzo, Acoustic Streaming: An Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian Perspective, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Vol. 825, pp. 600-630, 2017.
- N. Nama, R. Barnkob, Z. Mao, C. J. Kähler, F. Costanzo, and T. J. Huang, Numerical study of acoustophoretic motion of particles in a PDMS microchannel driven by surface acoustic waves, Lab on a Chip, Vol. 15, pp. 2700-2709, 2015.