(393x) Microfluidic in-Channel Growth of 3-D Nanostructures

3-D
Nanostructure Sensors in Microfluidic Channels

 Joseph Parisi, Yu Lei

Department of Chemical, Materials,
& Biomolecular Engineering, University of Connecticut, 191 Auditorium Road,
Unit 3222, Storrs, Connecticut 06269

Research for the detection of chemical
and biological species is consistently moving forward and creating more
accurate and sensitive devices.  However, many of these devices require
multiple steps for not only fabrication of the sensor material but also for
preparation of the sample for testing.  In many of these examples there is no
simple approach to economically fabricate novel 3-D sensing materials and package
them for future application. Our work focuses on in-situ preparation of
3-D nanostructured electrodes within a microfluidic channel.  These
nanostructures are fabricated in a fraction of the time of traditional
lithography, CVD and hydrothermal techniques, require less material and limit
any complicated fabrication steps.  Once the nanostructures are grown they are
immediately available for species detection. Since the sensor is directly
fabricated and confined to the microfluidic channel no additional fabrication
steps are needed.  The nanostructures in microfluidic channel based sensing
platform exhibit ultrasensitive detection limits as they combine the advantages
of nanomaterials and microfluidics.