Search results for "Microfluidic"

Slip Flow Over Structured Surfaces with Entrapped Microbubbles

2008

On hydrophobic surfaces, roughness may lead to a transition to a superhydrophobic state, where gas bubbles at the surface can have a strong impact on a detected slip. We present two-phase lattice Boltzmann simulations of a Couette flow over structured surfaces with attached gas bubbles. Even though the bubbles add slippery surfaces to the channel, they can cause negative slip to appear due to the increased roughness. The simulation method used allows the bubbles to deform due to viscous stresses. We find a decrease of the detected slip with increasing shear rate which is in contrast to some recent experimental results implicating that bubble deformation cannot account for these experiments.…

Microfluidic Preparation of Liquid Crystalline Elastomer Actuators

2018

This paper focuses on the microfluidic process (and its parameters) to prepare actuating particles from liquid crystalline elastomers. The preparation usually consists in the formation of droplets containing low molar mass liquid crystals at elevated temperatures. Subsequently, these particle precursors are oriented in the flow field of the capillary and solidified by a crosslinking polymerization, which produces the final actuating particles. The optimization of the process is necessary to obtain the actuating particles and the proper variation of the process parameters (temperature and flow rate) and allows variations of size and shape (from oblate to strongly prolate morphologies) as wel…

Microactuators: Control of the Properties of Micrometer Sized Actuators from Liquid Crystalline Elastomers Prepared in a Microfluidic Setup (Adv. Fun…

2010

In this article new results on the preparation of monodisperse particles from a liquid crystalline elastomer in a microfluidic setup are presnted. For this, droplets from a liquid crystalline monomer are prepared in a microfluidic device and polymerized while they are flowing inside a microtube. The parti­cles obtained by this method possess an internal orientation, which gives them actuating properties. When they are heated into the isotropic phase of the liquid crystalline material they show a reversible change in shape whereby they change their length in one direction by almost 100%. It is shown how the variation of experimental parameters during their synthesis impacts the properties of…

Microfluidic synthesis of micrometer-sized photoresponsive actuators based on liquid crystalline elastomers

2016

The fabrication of photoresponsive micrometer-sized liquid crystalline elastomer (LCE) particles has been described in this article for the first time. The preparation of the LCE particles using a microfluidic device by a continuous “on the fly” technique allows their fast processing with an irradiation time of less than 2 seconds. In order to accelerate the polymerization and to make the preparation of samples with thicknesses of several hundred microns possible, we modified a NIR-photoinitiation system by adding a bleaching agent. In addition to the photoinitiator, a side-chain liquid crystalline monomer containing an azo-group and a LC-crosslinker were used in the polymerization mixture.…

Transport of Water and Particles in Microfluidics Devices Lithographically Fabricated Using Proton Beam Writing (PBW)

2009

Proton beam writing (PBW) is a MeV ion beam lithography technique that has gained interest in many biological applications such as fabricating microfluidic devices for Lab-On-a-Chip (LOC) applications where capillary forces are important for fluid flow. PBW has a unique capability of being able to direct-write patterns in thick (1-30µm) polymer resist layers with straight vertical sidewalls. It can be used to prepare master stamps and moulds for mass production in polymeric materials. A recent development, where the direct writing of an entire pattern element is carried out in parallel makes PBW especially well suited for Bio-MEMS LOC applications. In this study we have examined the flow dy…

Functional liquid crystalline particles and beyond

2019

ABSTRACTRecently the preparation and handling of liquid crystalline (LC) particles, which cover the size from some 100 nano-meters to micro- and millimetres found more interest. This review describ...

Preparation of cholesteric particles from cellulose derivatives in a microfluidic setup

2011

A microfluidic setup was used to process lyotropic cholesteric liquid crystalline mixtures of cellulose derivatives into spherical particles in the micrometre scale. By the method of co-flowing injection, monodisperse droplets of the liquid crystal, dispersed in an aqueous carrier fluid, were prepared. Polymerization of the acrylic solvent with UV-light fixed the orientation obtained by the flowing motion. The resulting particles were characterized by polarizing optical microscopy.

Anisotropic flow in striped superhydrophobic channels

2012

We report results of dissipative particle dynamics simulations and develop a semi-analytical theory of an anisotropic flow in a parallel-plate channel with two superhydrophobic striped walls. Our approach is valid for any local slip at the gas sectors and an arbitrary distance between the plates, ranging from a thick to a thin channel. It allows us to optimize area fractions, slip lengths, channel thickness and texture orientation to maximize a transverse flow. Our results may be useful for extracting effective slip tensors from global measurements, such as the permeability of a channel, in experiments or simulations, and may also find applications in passive microfluidic mixing.

Interfacial Self-Assembly of Amphiphilic Dual Temperature Responsive Actuating Janus Particles

2018

Lattice Boltzmann simulations in microfluidics: probing the no-slip boundary condition in hydrophobic, rough, and surface nanobubble laden microchann…

2009

In this contribution we review recent efforts on investigations of the effect of (apparent) boundary slip by utilizing lattice Boltzmann simulations. We demonstrate the applicability of the method to treat fundamental questions in microfluidics by investigating fluid flow in hydrophobic and rough microchannels as well as over surfaces covered by nano- or microscale gas bubbles.