Liquid crystal-based open surface microfluidics manipulate liquid mobility and chemical composition on demand

The ability to control both the mobility and chemical compositions of microliter-scale aqueous droplets is an essential prerequisite for next-generation open surface microfluidics. Independently manipulating the chemical compositions of aqueous droplets without altering their mobility, however, rema...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Science advances Vol. 7; no. 40; p. eabi7607
Main Authors:	Xu, Yang, Rather, Adil M, Yao, Yuxing, Fang, Jen-Chun, Mamtani, Rajdeep S, Bennett, Robert K A, Atta, Richard G, Adera, Solomon, Tkalec, Uroš, Wang, Xiaoguang
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States American Association for the Advancement of Science 01-10-2021
Subjects:	Applied Sciences and Engineering Materials Science Physical and Materials Sciences SciAdv r-articles
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	The ability to control both the mobility and chemical compositions of microliter-scale aqueous droplets is an essential prerequisite for next-generation open surface microfluidics. Independently manipulating the chemical compositions of aqueous droplets without altering their mobility, however, remains challenging. In this work, we address this challenge by designing a class of open surface microfluidic platforms based on thermotropic liquid crystals (LCs). We demonstrate, both experimentally and theoretically, that the unique positional and orientational order of LC molecules intrinsically decouple cargo release functionality from droplet mobility via selective phase transitions. Furthermore, we build sodium sulfide–loaded LC surfaces that can efficiently precipitate heavy metal ions in sliding water droplets to final concentration less than 1 part per million for more than 500 cycles without causing droplets to become pinned. Overall, our results reveal that LC surfaces offer unique possibilities for the design of novel open surface fluidic systems with orthogonal functionalities.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23 These authors contributed equally to this work.
ISSN:	2375-2548 2375-2548
DOI:	10.1126/sciadv.abi7607