• BioChip Journal
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• 제12권4호
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• pp.257-267
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• 2018

Inertial microfluidics has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its superior benefits of high throughput, precise control, simplicity, and low cost. Many inertial microfluidic applications have been demonstrated for physiological sample processing, clinical diagnostics, and environmental monitoring and cleanup. In this review, we discuss the fundamental mechanisms and principles of inertial migration and Dean flow, which are the basis of inertial microfluidics, and provide basic scaling laws for designing the inertial microfluidic devices. This will allow end-users with diverse backgrounds to more easily take advantage of the inertial microfluidic technologies in a wide range of applications. A variety of recent applications are also classified according to the structure of the microchannel: straight channels and curved channels. Finally, several future perspectives of employing fluid inertia in microfluidic-based cell sorting are discussed. Inertial microfluidics is still expected to be promising in the near future with more novel designs using various shapes of cross section, sheath flows with different viscosities, or technologies that target micron and submicron bioparticles.

• 유체기계공업학회:학술대회논문집
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• 유체기계공업학회 2006년 제4회 한국유체공학학술대회 논문집
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• pp.309-312
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• 2006

Effective mixing is an important problem in microfluidics for chemical and biomechanical applications. In this study, the influences of the Reynolds number and the oscillating frequency on mixing characteristics of micro-stirrer are studied in a microchannel with single stirrer. The influence of fluid inertial effects in an active mixer is first discussed. It is found that the stirring effects by stirrer oscillation are promptly attenuated at low Reynolds number, which makes greatly difficult the rapid mixing. As the inertial effects are increased, the chaotic advection is generated and then developed. The mixing phase is finally developed some mushroom shaped structure. And the mixing efficiency is also studied as a function of the oscillating frequency. We found that the mixing efficiency does not always increase with higher oscillating frequency of stirrer. Consequently, we found the functional relation between the optimal frequency of a stirrer and the Reynolds number.

• Applied Science and Convergence Technology
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• 제24권5호
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• pp.196-202
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• 2015

Human blood consists of 55% of plasma and 45% of blood cells such as white blood cell (WBC) and red blood cell (RBC). In plasma, there are many kinds of promising biomarkers, which can be used for the diagnosis of various diseases and biological analysis. For diagnostic tools such as a lab-on-a-chip (LOC), blood plasma separation is a fundamental step for accomplishing a high performance in the detection of a disease. Highly efficient separators can increase the sensitivity and selectivity of biosensors and reduce diagnostic time. In order to achieve a higher yield in blood plasma separation, we propose a novel fluid wing structure that is optimized by COMSOL simulations by varying the fluidic channel width and the angle of the bifurcation. The fluid wing structure is inspired by the inertial particle separator system in helicopters where sand particles are prevented from following the air flow to an engine. The structure is ameliorated in order to satisfy biological and fluidic requirements at the micro scale to achieve high plasma yield and separation efficiency. In this study, we fabricated the fluid wing structure for the efficient microfluidic blood plasma separation. The high plasma yield of 67% is achieved with a channel width of $20{\mu}m$ in the fabricated fluidic chip and the result was not affected by the angle of the bifurcation.