Direct measurement of particle inertial migration in rectangular microchannels

Particles traveling at high velocities through microfluidic channels migrate from their starting streamlines due to inertial lift forces. Theories predict different scaling laws for these forces and there is little experimental evidence by which to validate theory. Here we experimentally measure the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Lab on a chip 2016-01, Vol.16 (15), p.284-285
Main Authors: Hood, Kaitlyn, Kahkeshani, Soroush, Di Carlo, Dino, Roper, Marcus
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Channels
Mathematical models
Migration
Particle size
Particle tracking
Position measurement
Scaling laws
Tracking (position)
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Summary:Particles traveling at high velocities through microfluidic channels migrate from their starting streamlines due to inertial lift forces. Theories predict different scaling laws for these forces and there is little experimental evidence by which to validate theory. Here we experimentally measure the three dimensional positions and migration velocities of particles. Our experimental method relies on a combination of sub-pixel accurate particle tracking and velocimetric reconstruction of the depth dimension to track thousands of individual particles in three dimensions. We show that there is no simple scaling of inertial forces upon particle size, but that migration velocities agree well with numerical simulations and with a two-term asymptotic theory that contains no unmeasured parameters. We experimentally measured the trajectories of particles undergoing microfluidic inertial focusing, and show that they can be predicted by an asymptotic theory with no unmeasured parameters.
ISSN:1473-0197
1473-0189
DOI:10.1039/c6lc00314a