10 accepted papers
This paper presents a novel non-contact sensing device for constructing stiffness distribution maps on soft-material surfaces. Since directly contacting and measuring each point is inefficient, the device applies an air jet to the surface to induce deformation, and the resulting displacement is meas
Mixing is important for microfluidic systems and placing obstacles in a flow path for generating advection, or splitting/recombination flows, is a very popular method for enhancing the mixing. In this paper, we present experimental investigations on such microfluidic mixing with four different shape…
This video presents a microfluidic phenomenon called “Virtual Vortex Gear (VVG)” and an application of it. The video contains 4 parts and is described as follows: The 1st part shows an application of VVG as a controllable valve in a micro fluidic system and the on and off of the valve are controlled…
This paper reports an ultra-fast manipulation on micro-scale objects in a microfluidic channel. The objects are manipulated in simple harmonic motions and the manipulation speed has been achieved up to 3000 Hz. While the maximum speed was only about 130 Hz in previous works, the speed is advanced wi…
Robot-integrated microfluidic chip is a promising tool to realize mechanical characterization of a single cell with high throughput and high accuracy. The microfluidic chip used in our system has a pair of mechanical microprobes to measure deformation and reaction force of cells. In our previous stu
An automatic system for evaluating single cell viscoelasticity is proposed and tested in this paper. The system includes three main operations, and they are the operations of catch, load and launch. In the catch operation, the system is capable of capturing a target cell by high-speed vision and hig
A surprising phenomenon is observed in a microfluidic channel where suspending microbeads are spontaneously aligned into lines. Microbeads are randomly distributed in the channel at a relatively high velocity (3.27 µm/ms), but start to align into lines at a relatively low velocity (0.05 µm/ms). The…
We developed a ‘hybrid actuator system’ to precisely control the position of a micro-particle at high speed in a microfluidic chip. The hybrid actuator system benefits from two actuator systems by combining an electroosmotic flow generator and pressure-driven flow induced by a piezoelectric actuator…
A novel method for sensing local pressure inside a microfluidic device is proposed and developed. The main advantage of the method is that the pressure can be visually seen without attaching any electrical wire or instrument. The method can also be easily integrated into applications, such as micro-…
This paper proposes the method for mechanical characterization of floating cells on a microfluidic chip. We measured the reactive force of cells on the chip by applying mechanical deformation to the cells. Particularly we focused on the method to improve the sensing resolution of the probe position…