Proposal Number: CTS-0424101 Principal Investigator: Jennifer Lukes Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania Proposal Title: SGER: Experimental technique to characterize droplet transport in nanoscale channels
The ability to characterize droplet flow through nanoscale fluidic channels will enable tremendous advances in biotechnology and chemical analysis, particularly in the areas of DNA sequencing, drug delivery, chemical separations, and single molecule detection. The goal of this research program is develop a technique capable of such detection. Based on the Coulter counter method widely used to characterize the transport of micron-sized particles in the biological sciences, and inspired by recent successes in characterizing transport of solid particles through nanoscale channels, the proposed experiments are expected to demonstrate the feasibility of detecting the transport of entrained liquid droplets through nanochannels. The work to be performed includes fabricating microchip samples with nanometer-scale channels, filling the channels with an emulsion, locally heating the channel to induce thermocapillary transport of the entrained liquid droplets, and performing time-resolved measurements of the nanochannel electrical conductivity. These measurements will be used to determine the size and velocity of the transported droplets. The novelty of the proposed experiments is that the nanochannels themselves will act as droplet detectors.
