If you haven’t already heard of Marblar, the crowd-sourcing website that enables many minds to work together to realise the potential of new technologies, then now is the time to find out more, as the Royal Society of Chemistry is sponsoring a Marblar challenge to find applications for a new microfluidic mixing device developed by Huanming Zia and co-workers based on their 2012 communication in Lab on a Chip!
Converting steady laminar flow to oscillatory flow through a hydroelasticity approach at microscales
H. M. Xia, Z. P. Wang, W. Fan, A. Wijaya, W. Wanga and Z. F. Wanga
DOI: 10.1039/C1LC20667B
The microfluidic mixer is a non-powered device that can be added in-line to convert laminar flow to oscillatory flow, achieving effective mixing in milliseconds – ordinarily the laminar flow behaviour at these scales means fluid streams only mix very slowly via diffusion, which has been a big limitation for development of microfluidic products.
If you might have an idea or think you could improve on someone else’s, then join in the discussion and maybe even submit an idea or two to win points and marbles!
