Abstract
Deterministic lateral displacement technology was originally developed in the realm of microfluidics, but has potential for larger scale separation as well. In our previous studies, we proposed a sieve-based lateral displacement device inspired on the principle of deterministic lateral displacement. The advantages of this new device is that it gives a lower pressure drop, lower risk of particle accumulation, higher throughput and is simpler to manufacture. However, until now this device has only been investigated for its separation of large particles of around 785 µm diameter. To separate smaller particles, we investigate several design parameters for their influence on the critical particle diameter. In a dimensionless evaluation, device designs with different geometry and dimensions were compared. It was found that sieve-based lateral displacement devices are able to displace particles due to the crucial role of the flow profile, despite of their unusual and asymmetric design. These results demonstrate the possibility to actively steer the velocity profile in order to reduce the critical diameter in deterministic lateral displacement devices, which makes this separation principle more accessible for large-scale, high throughput applications.
Highlights
Deterministic lateral displacement technology is originally a microfluidic suspension separation technique that holds potential for large scale separation of suspensions: it features low pressure drop and low risk of particle accumulation while the design and operation is simple[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The mean concentrations measured in outlet 5 are significantly influenced by changing the sieve angle, which holds for both particle sizes
These results agree with observations done for conventional full deterministic lateral displacement systems[12,14]
Summary
Deterministic lateral displacement technology is originally a microfluidic suspension separation technique that holds potential for large scale separation of suspensions: it features low pressure drop and low risk of particle accumulation while the design and operation is simple[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Particles having a diameter smaller than the critical diameter (Dc) are not displaced Instead they follow the direction of the fluid flow (Fig. 1C) and pass through the array of obstacles along with the fluid[8]. This leads to separation or fractionation of particles that are different in size. The size of the flow lanes does depend on the size of the pores in the sieves but depends on more (geometrical) parameters For this reason the deterministic lateral displacement theory (Equation 1) was analysed[3,12]
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