title: Inertia-enhanced pinched flow fractionation.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634-0921, United States.
authors.forename: Xinyu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634-0921, United States.
authors.forename: Xiangchun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Xuan
mesh_terms: D005591:Chemical Fractionation / Q000379:methods*; D046210:Microfluidic Analytical Techniques; D010316:Particle Size