Flexibility via fiber drawing

Abstract

Microfluidics Traditional microfluidic devices are fabricated either by building up layers or by etching solid materials, but both ways primarily result in devices with rectangular, triangular, or circular cross sections and limited flow geometries. Yuan et al. show that complex shapes like crosses and stars or even arbitrary shapes can be designed into millimeter-scale objects and then reduced in dimension, but not in cross-sectional profile, through a fiber drawing process. Channels with concave cross sections were used to study inertial flow effects, whereas coextrusion of conductive wires allowed for inertial dielectrophoretic particle manipulation. Sorted particles could then be extracted through the addition of a fiber-to-world connector that can split flow streams without disturbing the laminar flow. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 , E10830 (2018).