Abstract
Complex-shaped microparticles can enhance applications in drug delivery, tissue engineering, and structural materials, although techniques to fabricate these particles remain limited. A microfluidics-based process called optofluidic fabrication that utilizes inertial flows and ultraviolet polymerization has shown great potential for creating highly 3D-shaped particles in a high-throughput manner, but the particle dimensions are mainly at the millimeter scale. Here, a next generation optofluidic fabrication process is presented that utilizes on-the-fly fabricated multiscale fluidic channels producing customized sub-100 µm 3D-shaped microparticles. This flexible design scheme offers a user-friendly platform for rapid prototyping of new 3D particle shapes, providing greater potential for creating impactful engineered microparticles.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1800252 |
| Journal | Advanced Science |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2018 Jul |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was partially supported from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. NSF-IIA-1444104, a Korea University Grant, and RPI. Authors would like to thank Leo K. Hwang at COMSOL for his technical assistance with numerical simulations, and Bradley Johnson, Scott Merrullo, and Jiaying Yu for their technical assistance with analyzing DIY-pillar characterization. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC52-07NA27344.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Authors. Published by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
Keywords
- 3D microparticles
- inertial microfluidics
- optofluidic fabrication
- optofluidics
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Medicine (miscellaneous)
- Chemical Engineering(all)
- Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology (miscellaneous)
- Materials Science(all)
- Engineering(all)
- Physics and Astronomy(all)