Flow rate independent gradient generator and application in microfluidic free-flow electrophoresis

Surrogate-based optimization with adaptive sampling for microfluidic concentration gradient generator design

“…This will increase the design dimension to 9, viz., x ¼ [c 1 , ., c 6 , Dp 7,10 , Dp 8,10 , Dp 9,10 ], making it more challenging to construct the surrogate model and to search optimal parameters corresponding to minimum J d . Note that once the optimal values of the pressure difference are found, they can be converted to the inlet pressures at the reservoirs using eqn (9). Because of the identical size of the inlet branch channels in all Y-shaped mixers, the two inlet pressures and the two ow rates through each Y-shaped mixer are equal, that is q 1 ¼ q 2 , q 3 ¼ q 4 , and q 5 ¼ q 6 .…”

“…[5][6][7][8] Therefore, a variety of mCGGs are designed, microfabricated, and demonstrated in the eld of cell biology and biochemistry, including tree-shaped, altered treeshaped, Y-shaped, pressure-balanced, incomplete mixingbased, and membrane mCGGs. 6,9 The tree-shaped network is one of the earliest mCGG designs, which successively splits, mixes, and recombines biologically relevant chemical solution to form digitalized CGs across channel widths. 10,11 In order to generate more complex CGs with higher resolutions, the number of stages of tree-shaped mCGG needs to be increased, which however may be more prone to clogging or leakage.…”

“…13 Moreover, a Y-shaped generator is designed to simplify the structure compared to conventional and altered tree-shaped networks by reducing the mixing channel length. 9 In contrast to these complete mixingbased mCGGs, mCGGs utilizing partial mixing were also proposed by our coauthor that manipulates species transport within microchannels and juxtaposes constituent CGs to form complex ones, leading to simple network topology and salient device reliability. 12,14 mCGGs are also proposed to separate the ow by a porous membrane and generate CGs by only permitting specic molecules to pass through, and hence, yielding shear free CGG.…”

Carrier ampholyte‐free free‐flow isoelectric focusing for separation of protein

“…Because of its advantages of mild separation environment and solid support medium free characteristics, FFE has been successfully applied to the separation of various biological samples, such as nucleic acids , peptide , proteins , cell organelles , and so on. Moreover, most of the separation modes of CE can be applied to FFE as well , for example, free‐flow zone electrophoresis (FFZE) , free‐flow isoelectric focusing (FFIEF) , and free‐flow isotachophoresis . Among them, FFIEF shows the highest resolution .…”

Pressure-Driven Micro-Casting for Electrode Fabrication and Its Applications in Wear Grain Detections

“…The master mold pattern used in this work was a Christmas-tree like channel which is often used as a linear gradient concentration maker [14]. The complex channel network design consisted of a tree-like architecture at each channel branch.…”