Department of Mechanical Engineering, Masdar Institute, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 127788, Abu Dhabi, UAE.
College of Chemical Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, 610065, China.
Sci Rep. 2022 May 17;12(1):8178. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-11738-z.
Membrane-on-chip is of growing interest in a wide variety of high-throughput environmental and water research. Advances in membrane technology continuously provide novel materials and multi-functional structures. Yet, the incorporation of membrane into microfluidic devices remains challenging, thus limiting its versatile utilization. Herein, via micro-stereolithography 3D printing, we propose and fabricate a "fish gill" structure-integrated on-chip membrane device, which has the self-sealing attribute at structure-membrane interface without extra assembling. As a demonstration, metallic micromesh and polymeric membrane can also be easily embedded in 3D printed on-chip device to achieve anti-fouling and anti-clogging functionality for wastewater filtration. As evidenced from in-situ visualization of structure-fluid-foulant interactions during filtration process, the proposed approach successfully adopts the fish feeding mechanism, being able to "ricochet" foulant particles or droplets through hydrodynamic manipulation. When benchmarked with two common wastewater treatment scenarios, such as plastic micro-particles and emulsified oil droplets, our biomimetic filtration devices exhibit 2 ~ 3 times longer durability for high-flux filtration than devices with commercial membrane. This proposed 3D printing-on-membrane approach, elegantly bridging the fields of microfluidics and membrane science, is instrumental to many other applications in energy, sensing, analytical chemistry and biomedical engineering.
在各种高通量环境和水研究中，芯片上膜受到越来越多的关注。膜技术的进步不断提供新型材料和多功能结构。然而，将膜纳入微流控器件仍然具有挑战性，从而限制了其多功能的利用。在此，我们通过微立体光刻 3D 打印提出并制造了一种“鱼鳃”结构集成的片上膜器件，该器件具有在结构-膜界面处的自密封属性，而无需额外的组装。作为一个演示，金属微网和聚合物膜也可以容易地嵌入 3D 打印的片上装置中，以实现用于废水过滤的抗污染和防堵塞功能。从过滤过程中结构-流体-污染物相互作用的原位可视化可以看出，所提出的方法成功地采用了鱼类进食的机制，能够通过流体动力学操纵“反弹”污染物颗粒或液滴。与两种常见的废水处理情况（例如塑料微颗粒和乳化油滴）相比，我们的仿生过滤装置在高通量过滤方面的耐用性比具有商业膜的装置长 2 到 3 倍。这种提出的 3D 打印在膜上的方法巧妙地连接了微流控和膜科学领域，对能源、传感、分析化学和生物医学工程等许多其他应用具有重要意义。
