Adapting Taylor Dispersion to microfluidics scale

Isaacson, Geneva

Student Work

Adapting Taylor Dispersion to microfluidics scale

Public Deposited

Microfluidics is a field that studies fluid mechanics phenomena within channels of length scales varying from micrometers to millimeters. Microfluidic applications span the fields of biochemistry, physics, materials science, chemical engineering, and microbial ecology. This Major Qualifying Project is focused on designing an experimental setup and protocol to observe the well-known theory of Taylor dispersion at the microscale. The ultimate goal of developing this experiment is to establish an accessible and repeatable way to determine the dispersion coefficient of solutes using microfluidics. The experiment consists in injecting fluorescein dye solution into a straight microchannel of rectangular cross-section with aspect ratio 0.25, and observe as it disperses downstream due to the interplay of advection and diffusion. A camera positioned 3 cm away from the dye inlet hole, captures the solute evolution over time. Encouraging preliminary experimental results are able to reproduce Taylor dispersion at the microscale. The next steps will be to benchmark experimental results against known theoretically predicted dispersion coefficient values, and additional testing on microchannels with varying cross-sectional aspect ratios.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

Creator