Micromechanics of soft materials using microfluidics
Authors
Xu, Y
Zhu, H
Shen, Y
Guttenplan, APM
Saar, KL
Lu, Y
Vigolo, D
Itzhaki, LS
Publication Date
2022-04-11Journal Title
MRS Bulletin
ISSN
0883-7694
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
47
Issue
2
Pages
119-126
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Xu, Y., Zhu, H., Shen, Y., Guttenplan, A., Saar, K., Lu, Y., Vigolo, D., et al. (2022). Micromechanics of soft materials using microfluidics. MRS Bulletin, 47 (2), 119-126. https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-022-00279-5
Abstract
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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Micron-scale soft materials are finding a wide range of applications in bioengineering and molecular medicine, while also increasingly emerging as useful components for consumer products. The mechanical characterization of such microscale soft objects is conventionally performed with techniques such as atomic force microscopy or micropipette aspiration that measure the local properties of micron scale objects in a serial manner. To permit scalable characterization of the global mechanical properties of soft microscale objects, we developed and describe here a microfluidic platform that can be used for performing parallelized integrated measurements of the shear modulus of individual microscale particles. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by characterizing the mechanical properties of multiple protein microgels in parallel, and show that the obtained values are in good agreement with conventional serial measurements. This platform allows parallelized <jats:italic>in situ</jats:italic> measurements of the mechanical properties of soft deformable micron-scale particles, and builds on scalable single-layer soft-photolithography fabrication, making the measurement system readily adaptable for a range of potential applications.</jats:p>
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<jats:title>Graphical Abstract</jats:title>
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Keywords
Impact Article, Mechanics, Microgel, Microfluidics, Soft materials
Sponsorship
European Research Council (337969)
Identifiers
s43577-022-00279-5, 279
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-022-00279-5
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/337030
Rights
Licence:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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