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Photopatterning of tough single‐walled carbon nanotube composites in microfluidic channels and their application in gel‐free separations
Author(s) -
Makamba Honest,
Huang JiaWei,
Chen Huang Han,
Chen ShuHui
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
electrophoresis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.666
H-Index - 158
eISSN - 1522-2683
pISSN - 0173-0835
DOI - 10.1002/elps.200700832
Subject(s) - carbon nanotube , microfluidics , materials science , nanotechnology , composite material , nanotube
We report on the photopatterning of single carbon nanotube composites with soft hydrogel polymers in glass microchannels. Since the hydrogels by themselves are able to withstand liquid flow within the microchannels, we covalently combined them with single‐walled carbon nanotubes to impart mechanical strength. We attempted this approach by patterning the gels within the microchannels without prior surface modifications. Our results show that the 1‐cm nanocomposite hydrogels are far stronger than the free hydrogels. Moreover, the nanocomposites were able to concentrate and separate proteins within a 1.5‐cm distance using gel‐free buffers. The separation cannot only be tuned by changing the running buffer; the lack of gels in the running buffer reduces the chance of channel blockage and thus the lifetime of the device is prolonged. The usefulness of the patterned nanocomposites may be extended by a wide selection of nanocomposite properties and monomers to find a broad range of applications in lab‐on‐chip technology.