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https://stockholmuniversity.zoom.us/j/622224375
Meeting ID: 622 224 375
Abstract:
Abstract:
Contrary to what one might expect in low Reynolds number flows, colloidal particles advecting through microfluidic channels containing obstacle lattices will displace lateral to the flow in an irreversible fashion—a transport phenomenon termed “deterministic lateral displacement” (DLD). Although this mechanism has been used successfully for sorting colloidal particles in many biological/engineering applications, a disjointed & incomplete understanding of the dynamical theory behind this phenomenon has led to microdevice designs in the literature that are mostly well-suited only for simple particle manipulations, are not oriented towards handling continuously polydisperse suspensions, and exploit only one mode of microfluidic transport.
In this talk, I'll present my work with B. Kirby and J. Gleghorn on expanding & uniting theoretical frameworks on the dynamics of particles in these arrays, particularly by looking at the dynamics in the limit of infinitesimally small obstacles. There, we employ a novel symbolic dynamics approach that allows us to fully characterize the dynamics of particles in devices with any obstacle lattice geometry, use this theoretical construction to generate verifiable predictions for colloidal dynamics in these devices, and employ this theory to construct designs for such microdevices that could vastly improve over those in the literature. I'll conclude by discussing how this theory can be extended to systems with obstacles of finite size, among other intriguing possibilities.