Liquid crystal-based open surface microfluidics manipulate liquid mobility and chemical composition on demand.

Autor: Xu Y; William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA., Rather AM; William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA., Yao Y; Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA., Fang JC; William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA., Mamtani RS; William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA., Bennett RKA; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1, Canada., Atta RG; William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA., Adera S; Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA., Tkalec U; Institute of Biophysics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Vrazov trg 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia.; Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška 160, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia.; Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Jožef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia., Wang X; William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.; Sustainability Institute, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Science advances [Sci Adv] 2021 Oct; Vol. 7 (40), pp. eabi7607. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Oct 01.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi7607
Abstrakt: The ability to control both the mobility and chemical compositions of microliter-scale aqueous droplets is an essential prerequisite for next-generation open surface microfluidics. Independently manipulating the chemical compositions of aqueous droplets without altering their mobility, however, remains challenging. In this work, we address this challenge by designing a class of open surface microfluidic platforms based on thermotropic liquid crystals (LCs). We demonstrate, both experimentally and theoretically, that the unique positional and orientational order of LC molecules intrinsically decouple cargo release functionality from droplet mobility via selective phase transitions. Furthermore, we build sodium sulfide–loaded LC surfaces that can efficiently precipitate heavy metal ions in sliding water droplets to final concentration less than 1 part per million for more than 500 cycles without causing droplets to become pinned. Overall, our results reveal that LC surfaces offer unique possibilities for the design of novel open surface fluidic systems with orthogonal functionalities.
Databáze: MEDLINE