Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), Kyoto University of Advanced Study, Kyoto University, 606-8501, Kyoto, Japan.
Department of Molecular Engineering, Kyoto University, 616-8510, Kyoto, Japan.
Nat Commun. 2022 May 19;13(1):2281. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29956-4.
Advances in microfluidic technology towards flexibility, transparency, functionality, wearability, scale reduction or complexity enhancement are currently limited by choices in materials and assembly methods. Organized microfibrillation is a method for optically printing well-defined porosity into thin polymer films with ultrahigh resolution. Here we demonstrate this method to create self-enclosed microfluidic devices with a few simple steps, in a number of flexible and transparent formats. Structural colour, a property of organized microfibrillation, becomes an intrinsic feature of these microfluidic devices, enabling in-situ sensing capability. Since the system fluid dynamics are dependent on the internal pore size, capillary flow is shown to become characterized by structural colour, while independent of channel dimension, irrespective of whether devices are printed at the centimetre or micrometre scale. Moreover, the capability of generating and combining different internal porosities enables the OM microfluidics to be used for pore-size based applications, as demonstrated by separation of biomolecular mixtures.
微流控技术在灵活性、透明度、功能性、可穿戴性、规模缩小或复杂性增强方面的进展目前受到材料和组装方法选择的限制。有组织的微纤维化是一种将明确定义的多孔性光学打印到超薄聚合物薄膜中的方法，具有超高分辨率。在这里，我们演示了这种方法，只需几个简单的步骤，就可以在多种灵活和透明的格式中创建自封闭的微流控设备。结构色，有组织的微纤维化的一个特性，成为这些微流控设备的固有特征，从而实现了原位传感能力。由于系统流体动力学取决于内部孔径，因此毛细流动表现为结构色的特征，而与通道尺寸无关，无论设备是在厘米还是微米尺度上打印。此外，产生和组合不同内部孔隙度的能力使得 OM 微流控技术可用于基于孔径的应用，如通过分离生物分子混合物来证明。
