Microscale acoustofluidics-enabled single cell mechanotyping and nanoparticle separation

Microscale acoustofluidics, which refers to the ultrasonic manipulation of particles and fluids at microscale, relies on two second-order effect, i.e acoustic radiation force originating from the scattering of the sound waves and acoustic streaming typically arising from the acoustic energy dissipation in viscous fluids.

In this project, we will use microscale acoustofluidics as a tool to tackle two major challenges in contemporary biomedical research, i.e. label-free measurements of single cell mechanical properties and high-throughput separation of bio-nanoparticles.Cell mechanical properties and nanoparticle separation have numerous and essential application in life science.

However, exisiting methods have significant difficulties in performing either label-free single cell mechanotyping to measure multiple independent cell properties with one experiment, or high-through nanoparticle separation.In this project, we propose to use the recently discovered theory in nonlinear acoustics, i.e. the acoustic body force arising in fluids with an inhomogeneous distribution of fluid properties, to conduct single cell mechanotyping in three laminated fluids in a microchannel to extract three unknow cell properties, i.e. size, density, and compressibility, at one time.

Another approach based on the generation of acoustic body force by creating a small temperature gradient around nanoparticles to be sorted through laser heating will be applied for high-through nanoparticle separation.