Inertial microfluidics has been a highly active area of research in recent years for high-throughput focusing and sorting of synthetic and biological microparticles. However, existing inertial microfluidic devices always rely on microchannels with high-aspect-ratio geometries (channel width w < channel height h) and small cross-sections (w x h < 50 x 100 mu m(2)). Such deep and small structures increase fabrication difficulty and can limit manufacturing by large-scale and high-throughput production approaches such as roll-to-roll (R2R) hot embossing. In this work, we present a novel inertial microfluidic device using only a simple and low-aspect-ratio (LAR) straight microchannel (w > h) to achieve size-based sorting of microparticles and cells. The simple LAR geometry of the device enables successful high-throughput fabrication using R2R hot embossing. With optimized flow conditions and channel dimensions, we demonstrate continuous sorting of a mixture of 15 mu m and 10 mu m diameter microbeads with > 97% sorting efficiency using the low-cost and disposable R2R chip. We further demonstrate size-based sorting of bovine white blood cells, demonstrating the ability to process real cellular samples in our R2R chip. We envision that this R2R hot-embossed inertial microfluidic chip will serve as a powerful yet low-cost and disposable tool for size-based sorting of synthetic microparticles in industrial applications or cellular samples in cell biology research and clinical diagnostics.
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机译：近年来，惯性微流体一直是合成和生物微粒的高通量聚焦和分选研究的一个高度活跃的领域。但是，现有的惯性微流体装置始终依赖于具有高纵横比几何形状（通道宽度w <通道高度h）和小横截面（w x h <50 x 100μm（2））的微通道。这种深而小的结构增加了制造难度，并可能通过诸如卷对卷（R2R）热压花之类的大规模和高通量生产方法来限制制造。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新颖的惯性微流体装置，该装置仅使用简单且低纵横比（LAR）的直微通道（w> h）即可实现基于尺寸的微粒和细胞分类。该器件的简单LAR几何形状可使用R2R热压花技术成功进行高通量制造。通过优化的流动条件和通道尺寸，我们证明了使用低成本的一次性R2R芯片可以连续分选直径为15μm和10μm的微珠的混合物，分选效率> 97％。我们进一步展示了基于大小的牛白细胞分类，证明了在我们的R2R芯片中处理真实细胞样本的能力。我们设想，这种R2R热压印惯性微流控芯片将成为一种功能强大但成本低廉的一次性工具，用于在工业应用或细胞生物学研究和临床诊断中的细胞样品中基于尺寸的合成微粒分类。
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