Storslett Kari J, Muller Susan J
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Biomicrofluidics. 2017 May 26;11(3):034112. doi: 10.1063/1.4984302. eCollection 2017 May.
Two size-based separation strategies are evaluated for suspensions consisting of giant unilamellar vesicles with a broad, continuous distribution of diameters. Microfluidic devices were designed to separate an initial suspension into larger and smaller particles via either filtration or inertial focusing. These separation mechanisms were tested with suspensions of vesicles and suspensions of rigid spheres separately to illustrate the effect of deformability on separation ability. We define several separation metrics to assess the separation ability and to enable comparison between separation strategies. The filtration device significantly reduced the polydispersity of the separated vesicle fractions relative to the starting suspension and displayed an ability to separate vesicle suspensions at high throughputs. The device that utilized inertial focusing exhibited adequate polydispersity reduction and performed best with diluted vesicle suspensions. The inertial device had fewer issues with debris and trapped air, leading to short device preparation times and indicating a potential for continuous separation operation.
针对由直径分布广泛且连续的巨型单层囊泡组成的悬浮液，评估了两种基于尺寸的分离策略。设计了微流控装置，通过过滤或惯性聚焦将初始悬浮液分离成较大和较小的颗粒。分别用囊泡悬浮液和刚性球体悬浮液测试了这些分离机制，以说明可变形性对分离能力的影响。我们定义了几个分离指标来评估分离能力，并能够在分离策略之间进行比较。相对于起始悬浮液，过滤装置显著降低了分离出的囊泡级分的多分散性，并显示出在高通量下分离囊泡悬浮液的能力。利用惯性聚焦的装置表现出足够的多分散性降低，并且在稀释的囊泡悬浮液中表现最佳。惯性装置在碎片和 trapped air 方面问题较少，导致装置准备时间较短，并显示出连续分离操作的潜力。 （注：原文中“trapped air”不太明确准确意思，可能是“截留空气”之类的，暂按原文翻译）
