direct contact membrane distillation (dcmd) which emerges as an alternative separation technology can effectively perform a colloidal separation process under thermal driven force. dcmd is capable of extracting pure water from aqueous solutions containing non-volatile nanoparticles through the hydrophobic microporous membrane when a vapour pressure difference was established across the membrane...

Pressure-driven actuators play a critical role in many microfluidic technologies, but the ancillary equipment needed to operate pneumatic and hydraulic platforms has limited their portability. To address this issue, we created an electrostatic microvalve used to regulate pressures in hydraulic control lines. In turn, these control lines are able to actuate pressure-driven components, e.g., micr...

Polythermal ice sheets and glaciers contain both cold ice and temperate ice. We present two new models to describe the temperature and water content of such ice masses, accounting for the possibility of gravityand pressure-driven water drainage according to Darcy’s law. Both models are based on the principle of energy conservation; one additionally invokes the theory of viscous compaction to ca...

S. Devasenathipathy and J.G. Santiago The advent of microfabricated chemical analysis systems has led to a growing interest in microfabricated fluidic systems with characteristic scales in the range of a micron to a millimeter. A motivation to integrate components in a manner analogous to modern microelectronics is coupled with a potential for achieving massively parallel functions, and the fie...

This paper provides an attempt to measure the pressure distribution actuated by dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) actuator. The efficacy of DBD plasmas driven by repetitive nanosecond (NS) pulses for pressure distribution is investigated experimentally in quiescent air. The NS pulse driven DBD plasma actuator (NS-DBD hereafter, transfers very little momentum to the neutral air, so the value of...

Passive mixing based on microfluidics has won its popularity for its unique advantage, including easier operation, more efficient mixing performance and higher access to high integrity. The time-scale and performance of mixing process are usually characterized by mixing quality, which has been remarkably improved due to the introduction of chaos theory into passive micro mixers. In this paper, ...

We derive an analytic model for nonlinear “photon bubble” wave trains driven by buoyancy forces in magnetized, radiation pressure-dominated atmospheres. Continuous, periodic wave solutions exist when radiative diffusion is slow compared to the dynamical timescale of the atmosphere. We identify these waves with the saturation of a linear instability discovered by Arons — therefore, these wave tr...