A novel design of nanochannel structure in a micro–nanofluidic preconcentrator for electrokinetic ion enrichment

Abstract

Since the concentration of target molecules contained in most reagents in analytical chemistry experiments is lower than the minimum concentration required for subsequent detection, it is necessary for sample enrichment. Electrokinetic trapping that utilizes the principle of ion concentration polarization to achieve biomacromolecular enrichment is the most efficient. In this paper, based on the Poisson–Nernst–Plank equation, a novel design of nanochannel structure in a micro–nanofluidic preconcentrator for electrokinetic ion enrichment is carried out by numerical simulation. The results show that the enrichment process can be divided into three stages: enrichment generation, enrichment promotion and enrichment breakdown when the applied voltage is increased. Importantly, by comparing the six different structure nanochannels (straight line type, square wave type, rectangular type, circle type, zigzag type and multi-wave type), we found that the enrichment ratio produced by the rectangular nanochannel is the highest of the six nanochannels, which is 20.7 times. Rectangular nanochannel requires the lowest applied voltage to achieve the highest enrichment ratio. This work provides a novel design method and theoretical basis for the design of detection equipment in ultra-low concentration molecular detection tasks.