Surface Acoustic Wave Microfluidics

By Leslie Y. Yeo, James R. Friend. 2014

437 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fluid manipulations at the microscale and beyond are powerfully enabled through the use of 10–1,000-MHz acoustic waves. A superior alternative in many cases to other microfluidic actuation techniques, such high-frequency acoustics is almost universally produced by surface acoustic wave devices that employ electromechanical transduction in wafer-scale or thin-film piezoelectric media to generate the kinetic energy needed to transport and manipulate fluids placed in adjacent microfluidic structures. These waves are responsible for a diverse range of complex fluid transport phenomena—from interfacial fluid vibration and drop and confined fluid transport to jetting and atomization—underlying a flourishing research literature spanning fundamental fluid physics to chip-scale engineering applications. We highlight some of this literature to provide the reader with a historical basis, routes for more detailed study, and an impression of the field's future directions.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/183c7a068eca3d5c680dece72197582619829798