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.