High frequency travelling surface acoustic waves for microparticle separation

Ghulam Destgeer, Anas Alazzam, Hyung Jin Sung

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this study, we have demonstrated a particle separation device taking advantage of the high frequency sound waves. The sound waves, in the form of surface acoustic waves, are produced by an acoustofluidic platform built on top of a piezoelectric substrate bonded to a microfluidic channel. The particles’ mixture, pumped through the microchannel, is focused using a sheath fluid. A Travelling surface acoustic wave (TSAW), propagating normal to the flow, interacts with the particles and deflects them from their original path to induce size-based separation in a continuous flow. We initially started the experiment with 40 MHz TSAWs for deflecting 10 µm diameter polystyrene particles but failed. However, larger diameter particles (~ 30 µm) were successfully deflected from their streamlines and separated from the smaller particles (~ 10 µm) using TSAWs with 40 MHz frequency. The separation of smaller diameter particles (3, 5 and 7 µm) was also achieved using an order of magnitude higher-frequency (~ 133 MHz) TSAWs.

Original languageBritish English
Pages (from-to)3945-3952
Number of pages8
JournalJournal of Mechanical Science and Technology
Volume30
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Sep 2016

Keywords

  • Acoustofluidics
  • Microfluidics
  • Particle separation
  • Surface acoustic waves
  • Travelling surface acoustic waves

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