This review reports the progress on the recent development of micromixers. The review first presents the different micromixer types and designs. Micromixers in this review are categorized as passive micromixers and active micromixers. Due to the simple fabrication technology and the easy implementation in a complex microfluidic system, passive micromixers will be the focus of this review. Next, the review discusses the operation points of the micromixers based on characteristic dimensionless numbers such as Reynolds number Re, Peclet number Pe, and in dynamic cases the Strouhal number St. The fabrication technologies for different mixer types are also analysed. Quantification techniques for evaluation of the performance of micromixers are discussed. Finally, the review addresses typical applications of micromixers.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0960-1317/15/2/R01/pdf

Micromixers?a review

Nanotechnology is the science of understanding matter and the control of matter at dimensions of 100 nm or less. Encompassing nanoscale science, engineering, and technology, nanotechnology involves imaging, measuring, modeling, and manipulation of matter at this level of precision. An important aspect of research in nanotechnology involves precision control and manipulation of devices and materials at a nanoscale, i.e., nanopositioning. Nanopositioners are precision mechatronic systems designed to move objects over a small range with a resolution down to a fraction of an atomic diameter. The desired attributes of a nanopositioner are extremely high resolution, accuracy, stability, and fast response. The key to successful nanopositioning is accurate position sensing and feedback control of the motion. This paper presents an overview of nanopositioning technologies and devices emphasizing the key role of advanced control techniques in improving precision, accuracy, and speed of operation of these systems.

/pdf/a-survey-of-control-issues-in-nanopositioning-1zgjre9s1l.pdf

A Survey of Control Issues in Nanopositioning

This article reviews acoustic microfiuidics: the use of acoustic fields, principally ultrasonics, for application in microfiuidics. Although acoustics is a classical field, its promising, and indeed perplexing, capabilities in powerfully manipulating both fluids and particles within those fluids on the microscale to nanoscale has revived interest in it. The bewildering state of the literature and ample jargon from decades of research is reorganized and presented in the context of models derived from first principles. This hopefully will make the area accessible for researchers with experience in materials science, fluid mechanics, or dynamics. The abundance of interesting phenomena arising from nonlinear interactions in ultrasound that easily appear at these small scales is considered, especially in surface acoustic wave devices that are simple to fabricate with planar lithography techniques common in microfluidics, along with the many applications in microfluidics and nanofluidics that appear through the literature.

/pdf/microscale-acoustofluidics-microfluidics-driven-via-5bet39j13p.pdf

Microscale acoustofluidics: Microfluidics driven via acoustics and ultrasonics

The aim of microfluidic mixing is to achieve a thorough and rapid mixing of multiple samples in microscale devices. In such devices, sample mixing is essentially achieved by enhancing the diffusion effect between the different species flows. Broadly speaking, microfluidic mixing schemes can be categorized as either “active”, where an external energy force is applied to perturb the sample species, or “passive”, where the contact area and contact time of the species samples are increased through specially-designed microchannel configurations. Many mixers have been proposed to facilitate this task over the past 10 years. Accordingly, this paper commences by providing a high level overview of the field of microfluidic mixing devices before describing some of the more significant proposals for active and passive mixers.

/pdf/microfluidic-mixing-a-review-3egj61w5ox.pdf

Microfluidic Mixing: A Review

The ability to tailor the chemical composition and structure of a surface at the sub-100-nm length scale is important for studying topics ranging from molecular electronics to materials assembly, and for investigating biological recognition at the single biomolecule level. Dip-pen nanolithography (DPN) is a scanning probe microscopy-based nanofabrication technique that uniquely combines direct-write soft-matter compatibility with the high resolution and registry of atomic force microscopy (AFM), which makes it a powerful tool for depositing soft and hard materials, in the form of stable and functional architectures, on a variety of surfaces. The technology is accessible to any researcher who can operate an AFM instrument and is now used by more than 200 laboratories throughout the world. This article introduces DPN and reviews the rapid growth of the field of DPN-enabled research and applications over the past several years.

Applications of dip-pen nanolithography.

This paper details the theory, fabrication, and characterization of a new Lamb wave device. Built using capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs), the structure described uses rectangular membranes to excite and receive Lamb waves on a silicon substrate. An equivalent circuit model for the transducer is proposed that produces results, which match well with those observed by experiment. During the derivation of this model, emphasis is placed on the resistance presented to the transducer membranes by the Lamb wave modes. Finite element analysis performed in this effort shows that the dominant propagating mode in the device is the lowest order antisymmetric flexural wave (A/sub 0/). Furthermore, most of the power that couples into the Lamb wave is due to energy in the vibrating membrane that is transferred to the substrate through the supporting posts of the device. The manufacturing process of the structure, which relies solely on fundamental IC-fabrication techniques, is also discussed. The resulting device has an 18 /spl mu/m-thick substrate that is almost entirely made up of crystalline silicon and operates at a frequency of 2.1 MHz. The characterization of this device includes S-parameter and laser vibrometer measurements as well as delay-line transmission data. The insertion loss, as determined by both S-parameter and delay-line transmission measurements, is 20 dB at 2.1 MHz. When configured as a delay-line oscillator, the device functions well as a sensor with sensitivity to changes in the mass loading of its substrate.

Capacitive micromachined ultrasonic Lamb wave transducers using rectangular membranes

Capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) have long been studied. Past research has shown that CMUTs indeed have remarkable features such as wide bandwidth and high efficiency. This paper introduces an inclusion to the CMUT technology that uses the wafer-bonding technique to fabricate membranes on silicon. This new technology enables the fabrication of large membranes with large gaps, and expands the frequency span of CMUTs to 10 kHz in the low end. CMUT devices with different frequency spans are fabricated using both technologies, and tested. Electromechanical coupling efficiency, k/sub T//sup 2/, value as high as 0.85 and fractional immersion bandwidth as wide as 175 % are measured.

Broadband capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers ranging from 10 kHz to 60 MHz for imaging arrays and more

Lamb wave devices based on capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) have been built on 500-μm-thick silicon wafers for frequencies in the vicinity of 1 MHz CMUTs have been used to both excite and detect Lamb waves in the substrate This configuration eliminates the need for piezoelectric materials, which are not compatible with the existing integrated circuit (IC) fabrication techniques, and allows easy integration of Lamb wave devices and electronics on the same wafer Finite element analysis of the devices shows that the lowest order antisymmetric Lamb wave (A0) is the dominant mode in the substrate in this frequency range This result is also confirmed by demonstration experiments

Lamb wave devices using capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers

Membranes supported by posts are used as vibrating elements of capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs). The residual stress built up during the fabrication process determines the transducer properties such as resonance frequency, collapse voltage, and gap distance. Hence, it is important to evaluate and control the stress in thin film CMUT membranes. The residual stress in the membrane causes significant vertical displacements at the center of the membrane. The stress bends the membrane posts, and the slope at the membrane edges result in amplified displacement at the center by the radius of the membrane. By measuring the center displacement, it is possible to determine the stress provided that Young's modulus of the thin film is known accurately. Usually, in thin film structures Young's modulus differs from that of bulk materials and it depends on thin film deposition technique. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for the measurement of stress and Young's modulus of CMUT membranes. The technique depends on the measurement of membrane deflection and resonance frequency. We modeled the stress and Young's modulus dependence of membrane deflection and resonance frequency using finite element analysis. We used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to measure the membrane deflection and a laser interferometer to determine the resonance frequency of the membrane. The technique is tested on a CMUT membrane. We found that our LPCVD deposition technique yields residual stress of around 100 MPa and Young's modulus of around 300 GPa.

/pdf/residual-stress-and-young-s-modulus-measurement-of-2eu8kz0jg8.pdf

Residual stress and Young's modulus measurement of capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer membranes

The paper describes an annular CMUT ring array designed and fabricated for the tip of a catheter used for forward-looking intravascular imaging. A 64-element, 2-mm average diameter array was fabricated as an experimental prototype. A single element in the array is connected to a single-channel custom front-end integrated circuit for pulse-echo operation. In conventional operation, the transducer operates at around 10 MHz. In the collapsed regime, the operating frequency shifts to 25 MHz and the received echo amplitude is tripled. The SNR is measured as 23 dB in a 50-MHz measurement bandwidth for an echo signal from a plane reflector at 1.5 mm. We also performed a nonlinear dynamic transient finite element analysis for the transducer, and found these results to be in good agreement with experimental measurements, both for conventional and collapsed operation.

/pdf/cmut-ring-arrays-for-forward-looking-intravascular-imaging-357xugzkch.pdf

Goksen G. Yaralioglu

Papers

Capacitive micromachined ultrasonic Lamb wave transducers using rectangular membranes

Broadband capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers ranging from 10 kHz to 60 MHz for imaging arrays and more

Lamb wave devices using capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers

Residual stress and Young's modulus measurement of capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer membranes

CMUT ring arrays for forward-looking intravascular imaging