Congratulations to Dr. Xiangchun Xuan! He has won the prestigious NSF CAREER Award, for his project “Particle Magnetophoresis in Ferrofluid Microflows for Lab-on-a-Chip Applications”
Magnetic field-induced particle manipulation is simple and cheap as compared to other techniques (e.g., electric, acoustic, and optical) that are applicable to microfluidic devices. It is non-invasive and free of fluid heating issues that accompany nearly all other techniques, and is therefore well suited to handling bioparticles. However, traditional magnetic control requires the particles to be manipulated being magnetizable, which renders it necessary to magnetically label bioparticles. Ferrofluids have been recently demonstrated to implement nonmagnetic particle and cell manipulations in microfluidic devices with no magnetic tagging. The success of these devices relies on a comprehensive understanding of particle magnetophoresis in ferrofluid flows. [Read More]
