Nanoporous polymers have emerged as one of the most powerful platforms for microfluidic applications. These types of polymers have shown promise for new possibilities for ion transportation, counting particles, sensing molecules, and so on. However, flow in porous media has been a subject of active research for the past few decades. Recently, ion-selective membranes have also gained significant interest in detecting different biomolecules from biofluids, i.e., sweat sampling and analysis. Inspired by the recent advances in nanoporous polymers, we recently investigated the surfaces of the commercially available nanoporous polymers for droplet nanofluidics. Here, we aim to understand the flow behavior of a microdroplet on a nanoporous polymer tube and manipulate the flow velocity by controlled interfacial phenomena that occurs outside of the nanopores. Our preliminary investigation involves harnessing this new class of nanomaterials that shows promise for applications that has potential impacts on nano-dilution, zonal analyte transfer in micro-tubes, and intermolecular interaction at the nanopores. While a majority of the nanofluidic demonstrations in literature utilize lithography-based approaches, our method of manipulating droplets harnessing the array of nanopores is unconventional and currently foreign in literature. We closely investigated the micro/nanostructure of the material in order to understand the molecule transfer processes in relation to change in interfacial behavior of the tube. We will also demonstrate the utility of the current study highlighting a few soft material applications.

Harnessing surfaces of nanoporous polymer fibers for unconventional nanofluidics

ACS Spring 2022

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