Acoustic bubble enhanced pinched flow fractionation for microparticle separation

Pinched flow fractionation is a simple method for separating micron-sized particles by size, but has certain intrinsic limitations, e.g. requirement of a pinched segment similar to particle size and limited separation distance. In this paper, we developed an acoustic bubble enhanced pinched flow fractionation (PFF) method for microparticle separation. The proposed technique utilized microbubble streaming flows to overcome the limitations of conventional PFF. Our device has demonstrated separation of different sized microparticles (diameters 10 and 2 μm) with a larger pinched segment (60 μm) and at different buffer/particle solution flow rate ratios (5–25). The separation distances between particles are larger (as much as twice as large) than those achieved with conventional PFF. In addition, the separation position and distance can be adjusted by changing the driving voltage. The robust performance is due to the unique features of the flow field inside the pinched segment. We investigated several factors, including flow rate ratio, total flow rate and driving voltage, that affect the separation performance.