Inertial Microfluidic Band-pass Separations

This work presents an inertial microfluidic band-pass filter, enabling continuous separation of three sizes of particles or cells with <3μm difference in diameter. The design uses inertial forces to focus particles into two bands along side walls. Two chambers with side outlets are cascaded in series to generate microvortices for continuous band-pass separations. Particles with diameters 23μm, 18.5μm and 15μm were used as cell surrogates to demonstrate separation. Sorting of particle aggregates, doublets, and single particles was also demonstrated. Our results suggest that this simple planar device is applicable for continuous separation of cell aggregates, doublet and single cells.