• [2014-12-04]

  Dielectrophoretic Microdevices with Tunable Funcations

Speaker: Dr Weihua Li
University of Wollongong

Host: Prof. Huiling Duan
Time: Dec.9(Tue), 10:30-12:00 a.m.
Venue: Room 434, COE Mechanics Building

Abstract
Microfluidic technology has achieved significant progress over the past two decades. This fascinating technology holds broad application areas including sample preparation, clinical diagnosis, waste water treatment, drug screening and material synthesis. Various techniques have already been proposed and developed to manipulate particles in microfluidics, which categorised as active and passive techniques according to the source of the manipulating force. Active techniques such as dielectrophoresis, magnetophoresis and acoustophoresis rely on an external force field, whereas passive techniques depend entirely on the channel geometry or intrinsic hydrodynamic forces, such as pinched flow fractionation, deterministic lateral displacement and inertial microfluidics. An active microfluidic device generally allows for a more precise control of target particles, while being very flexible for a wide range of biological particles and tunable in real-time. However, the flow speed is always limited because particles must be exposed to the external force field for sufficient duration to achieve effective functionality, which reduces their throughput. On the contrary, a passive microfluidic device is robust and has a high throughput. However, the fixed geometry and design of the passive device limit its manipulative capability, making it only effective for a specific range of particle properties.
Our group mainly focuses on the development of DEP based hybrid microdevices. In this talk, three typical microdevices in terms of design and verification will be presented. 
1. Li, M., et al., Microfluid. Nanofluid., 14, 527-539, 2013.
2. Yan, S., et al., Sci. Rep., 4, 5060, 2014
3. Yan, S.et al., Lab Chip 14, 2993-3003, 2014.
4. Yan, S., et al., Electrophoresis, in press.
5. Zhang, J., et al., RSC Advances 4, 62076-62085, 2014.
6. Zhang, J., et al., Sci. Rep. 4, 4527, 2014.

Speaker
Weihua Li, PhD, is a Professor and Director of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Strength at the University of Wollongong (UOW). He obtained his B.Eng (1992) and M.Eng (1995) from the University of Science and Technology of China, and PhD from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore (2001). From 2001 to 2003, he worked as a Research Fellow at NTU. Since 2003, he has been working as academic staff at the School of Mechanical, Materials and Mechatronic Engineering, UOW, Australia. His research focuses on magnetorheological materials and their applications, microfluidics, rheology, and intelligent mechatronics. He has been involving more than 48 research grants funded by Australian Research Council, Australian Academy of Sciences, NSFC, Hong Kong RGC, etc. He is serving as an associate editor or editorial board member for nine international journals. He has published more than 140 journal articles and about 110 conference papers. He is a recipient of Australian Endeavour Fellowship (2011), and JSPS Invitation Fellowship (2014). 

Welcome to the lecture!