Spiral microfluidic nanoparticle separators

Nanoparticles have potential applications in many areas such as consumer products, health care, electronics, energy and other industries. As the use of nanoparticles in manufacturing increases, we anticipate a growing need to detect and measure particles of nanometer scale dimensions in fluids to control emissions of possible toxic nanoparticles. At present most particle separation techniques are based on membrane assisted filtering schemes. Unfortunately their efficiency is limited by the membrane pore size, making them inefficient for separating a wide range of sizes. In this paper, we propose a passive spiral microfluidic geometry for momentum-based particle separations. The proposed design is versatile and is capable of separating particulate mixtures over a wide dynamic range and we expect it will enable a variety of environmental, medical, or manufacturing applications that involve rapid separation of nanoparticles in real-world samples with a wide range of particle components.