Amaury de Hemptinne of the Department of Chemical Engineering was awarded with the 1st prize for the best oral presentation in the session Chemical Processes and Reactor Technologies at the CRF-ChemCYS Symposium 2022 (Chemical Research in Flanders - Chemistry Conference for Young Scientists) held in Blankenberge, Belgium in October 2022. Amaury received the prize for his oral contribution titled “Microfluidic device for multilayer coating of magnetic microparticles”.
Microfluidic device for multilayer coating of magnetic microparticles
A. de Hemptinne, , P. Gelin, I. Ziemecka, W. De Malsche*
µFlow Group, Department of Chemical engineering, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 1050 Brussels, Belgium
* Corresponding author
ABSTRACT
In this work, a microfluidic chip was developed taking advantage of magnetic fields for Layer-by-Layer assembly. We demonstrate the coating of four layers at the surface of magnetic particles.
Our chip unit accommodates three parallel liquid streams, with two reactant solutions separated by a washing solution. Particles are carried by the axially oriented flow and are deflected laterally in a perpendicular direction to the flow by the magnetic field of external magnets. Particles follow a zigzag pattern and switch from liquid stream to liquid stream. A layer is adsorbed on the particles during each passage in the reacting solutions. To minimize the diffusion of liquids, the streams are separated by walls, except near particle exchange regions. This allows to increase the number of chip units placed in series thus increasing the number of coated layers.