acoustofluidics in biomedical applications
Open Access
- Author:
- Chen, Yuchao
- Graduate Program:
- Engineering Science and Mechanics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- December 18, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Jun Huang, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jun Huang, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Bernhard R Tittmann, Committee Member
Bruce Gluckman, Committee Member
Siyang Zheng, Committee Member
Corina Stefania Drapaca, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Acoustic wave
Microfluidics
Biomedical applications
Cell separation - Abstract:
- Conventional benchtop techniques have limited abilities to isolate and analyze cells, especially rare cells, due to their low selectivity and significant sample loss. Rapid advances in microfluidics have provided some robust solutions to meet the challenges in cell studies. Besides having a high efficiency and a high sensitivity, microfluidics has advanced features such as simple handling of nanoliter-scale volumes and multiplexing capabilities which enable high processing throughput. All of these make microfluidics a practical platform to deal with the isolation and analysis of cells. By introducing acoustic tweezers into microfluidics, acoustofluidic technology has been developed which is able to control and manipulate nano/micro-objects with gentle acoustic radiation forces. This thesis presents a series of acoustofluidic based techniques for cell separation and analysis, including: (1) isolation of platelets from whole blood with a high-throughput acoustic separation device; (2) microfluidic cytometry for cell analysis enabled by standing surface acoustic waves; (3) acoustic cell trapping for rare cell enrichment, and (4) tunable nanowire patterning for biosensing. These techniques also show a high versatility of the acoustic tweezers, which have been used to achieve acoustic separation, acoustic 3D focusing, acoustic trapping, as well as acoustic patterning in this thesis. Due to the advantages of high biocompatibility, non-contact manipulation, compact size, and low power consumption, the acoustofluidic technologies are invaluable in many biochemical/biomedical applications.