One application may facilitate disease diagnosis
Every cook has a blender to mix ingredients for dishes, but no one has a gadget to separate materials that have already been mixed into a batter. Now a University of New Mexico School of Engineering professor and his collaborators have figured out a way to both mix and separate on an extremely small scale.
Photo: Assistant Professor Dimiter N. Petsev, Chemical and Nuclear Engineering
UNM Assistant Professor of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Dimiter N. Petsev is working with Suk Tai Chang from North Carolina State University, Vesselin N. Paunov from the University of Hull in the United Kingdom and Orlin D. Velev from North Carolina State University to develop ways to manipulate the components in fluids moving through channels less than half a millimeter wide.
They do it by manipulating electrical fields of alternating and direct current. In their experiments, the fields caused semiconductor diodes to act as self-propelling particles through water in the channels. The direction of the flow is controlled via the electrical field. Details of the experiments have just been published by the journal “Nature Materials”.
Petsev believes one interesting potential application for the research will be a faster way to separate proteins in fluid samples to help diagnose diseases. A change in the amounts of some proteins produced in the body can signal changes in the health of an individual before symptoms of a particular disease can be identified. If proteins can be easily separated, it could facilitate rapid diagnosis.
The research applies to mixing components in fluids as well as separating them. Mixing fluids in channels smaller than the tip of a ballpoint pen is difficult, but this research illustrates a way to do that in a very controlled way.
Petsev’s research may also allow him to design a sort of pump to move the liquids through the microchannels for a variety of other applications. It’s a new development in microfluidics that holds some interesting possibilities for the future.
Petsev’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) and Partnership for Research and Education in Materials (PREM) programs.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at March 20, 2007 10:27 AM