China News Service, Beijing, February 6 (Reporter Sun Zifa) Springer Nature's professional academic journal "Nature-Chemical Engineering" recently published a materials paper. A Chinese university research team demonstrated a rapid and on-demand assembly of liquids. device method by connecting droplets like building blocks into small upright structures.
The research team says this approach, inspired by toy building blocks, brings a combinable, reconfigurable approach to building fluidic devices such as batteries, small reactors and on-site point-of-care detection in minutes.
According to reports, traditional liquid device devices are expensive and time-consuming to manufacture, and usually rely on pre-designed solid walls to confine the liquid, or use complex capillary structures to finely control liquid behavior. This affects the reconfigurability of such devices, especially in situations where instant decision-making is required.
In this study, co-corresponding authors of the paper, Professor Gu Zhongze of the School of Biological Sciences and Medical Engineering of Southeast University, associate researcher Du Xin, and colleagues developed a new method to build liquid devices by assembling and disassembling droplets like toy building blocks. . These devices consist of two- and three-dimensional geometries, with precisely positioned droplets as units, placed in columnar substrates cultured in silicone oil.
Experiments in this study showed that adjacent miscible liquid units connect to each other, while immiscible liquids do not mix, forming separate units. Using a printing device to precisely place droplet units, the research team was able to build liquid devices of different geometries and compositions in just a few minutes. These structures can be dismantled (cut) using a Teflon-like paper.
Applying this method, the Southeast University research team also demonstrated the construction of batteries, small reactors, and an on-site point-of-care detection method that may be used for medical diagnosis. They note that structures built using this method can be completed in a matter of minutes to tens of minutes. (over)