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Surface modification offers an efficient and economical route to installing functional groups on a polymer surface. This work demonstrates that primary amine groups can be introduced onto a polymer surface via Buchwald–Hartwig amination, and the functionalized substrates can be chemically bonded to produce functional microfluidic devices. By activating the CCl bond in commercially used poly(chloro‐p‐xylylene) (parylene C) by Pd catalyst and substituting Cl with the amine source, the amine groups are successfully installed in a facile and recyclable manner. The substrates can be covalently bonded with each other via amine‐isocyanate chemistry, providing much higher bonding strength compared to previous methods based on noncovalent adhesive coatings. As a result, transparent and flexible microfluidic channels can be fabricated that are compatible with organic solvents and high pressure. Retention of amine group reactivity in the channel suggests the potential of this methodology for the surface immobilization of functional molecules for microfluidic reactors and biosensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High sensitivity, on-chip calorimeter platform using V 2 O 5 thin film thermistor was developed. Integration of a V 2 O 5 thermistor with a high temperature sensitivity of −2.2%/K with a vacuum insulated, suspended SiN membrane structure enabled a low thermal conductance of 12 μW/K and a direct detection of 10 nW of heat with an estimated detection limit of 570 pW. We also investigated the feasibility of integrating the platform with a microfluidic system, and, suggest that, based on numerical simulations, a further 5-fold lowering of detection limit may be possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microfluidics has experienced massive growth in the past two decades, and especially with advances in rapid prototyping researchers have explored a multitude of channel structures, fluid and particle mixtures, and integration with electrical and optical systems towards solving problems in healthcare, biological and chemical analysis, materials synthesis, and other emerging areas that can benefit from the scale, automation, or the unique physics of these systems. Inertial microfluidics, which relies on the unconventional use of fluid inertia in microfluidic platforms, is one of the emerging fields that make use of unique physical phenomena that are accessible in microscale patterned channels. Channel shapes that focus, concentrate, order, separate, transfer, and mix particles and fluids have been demonstrated, however physical underpinnings guiding these channel designs have been limited and much of the development has been based on experimentally-derived intuition. Here we aim to provide a deeper understanding of mechanisms and underlying physics in these systems which can lead to more effective and reliable designs with less iteration. To place the inertial effects into context we also discuss related fluid-induced forces present in particulate flows including forces due to non-Newtonian fluids, particle asymmetry, and particle deformability. We then highlight the inverse situation and describe the effect of the suspended particles acting on the fluid in a channel flow. Finally, we discuss the importance of structured channels, i.e. channels with boundary conditions that vary in the streamwise direction, and their potential as a means to achieve unprecedented three-dimensional control over fluid and particles in microchannels. Ultimately, we hope that an improved fundamental and quantitative understanding of inertial fluid dynamic effects can lead to unprecedented capabilities to program fluid and particle flow towards automation of biomedicine, materials synthesis, and chemical process control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the behavior of a single particle flowing in a microchannel is a necessary step in designing and optimizing efficient microfluidic devices for the separation, concentration, counting, detecting, sorting, or mixing of particles in suspension. Although the inertial migration of spherical particles has been deeply investigated in the last two decades, most of the targeted applications involve shaped particles whose behavior in microflows is still far from being completely understood. While traveling in a channel, a particle both rotates and translates: it translates in the streamwise direction driven by the fluid flow but also in the cross-section perpendicular to the streamwise direction due to inertial effects. In addition, particles' rotation and translation motions are coupled. Most of the existing works investigating the transport of particles in microchannels decouple their rotational and lateral migration behaviors: particle rotation is mainly studied in simple shear flows, whereas lateral migration is neglected, and studies on lateral migration mostly focus on spherical particles whose rotational behavior is simple. The aim of this review is to provide a summary of the different works existing in the literature on the inertial migration and the rotational behavior of non-spherical particles with a focus and discussion on the remaining scientific challenges in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microfluidic lenses that have been fabricated using PDMS have serious limitations due to the high gas permeability of the material, which leads to evaporation of the filling liquid and air bubble formation. We report a fast and reliable method of fabricating flexible, thin-film parylene microfluidic devices, and their application in tunable microfluidic lens arrays. A parylene microfluidic lens was built by molding and bonding 1.4-μm-thick parylene layers using nano-adhesivelayers deposited by initiated chemical vapor deposition (iCVD). The focal length of the lens could be tuned by changing the radius of curvature of the lens and/or changing the refractive indices of the filling liquids. The parylene microfluidic lens showed a large range of focal length tuning, and high reproducibility over hundreds of cycles. Image 1 • A flexible, thin-film polyer microfluidic lens array was developed to address issues of highly gas pearmeable PDMS. • Parylene microfluidics was built by bonding chemically inert parylene layers using nano-adhesive layer deposited by iCVD. • Focal length of the lens could be tuned by the radius of curvature and the refractive index of filling liquids. • Repeatibility of the lens operation was tested over hundreds of cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]