Inertial particle focusing in parallel microfluidic channels for high-throughput filtration

Abstract

In this study, we introduce inertial microfluidics in straight, parallel channels for high-throughput particle filtration. We show that particles flowing through low aspect ratio rectangular microchannels can be focused into four particle streams, distributed at the centers of each wall face, or into two particle streams, at the centers of the longest channel walls, depending on the particles' size. For high-throughput filtration, we fabricated scalable, single inlet and two outlet, parallel channel microdevices, using a high-density 3D microfluidic PDMS channel manufacturing technology, in a design that allows for easy integration with other downstream on-chip functions we recently described. We demonstrate filtration of 24 μm particles from a suspension mixture in a microdevice with four parallel channels. The filtration efficiency at a non-optimized flow rate of 0.8 ml/min was 82%.