Plug-and-Play Acoustofluidic Devices With Fully Detachable Transducers and PDMS Microchambers

Conventional surface acoustic wave (SAW) acoustic tweezers limit their flexible availability and sustainability due to the permanent attachment of all components, such as the introduction of biological cross-contamination when reusing directly bonded microchambers, and the increased cost of changing the microfabricated electrode pattern on the relatively expensive and fragile LiNbO3 (LN) surface when changing the bioanalysis target. To address these problems, we proposed a plug-and-play fully detachable SAW acoustic tweezers (FDSAs) platform comprising a pair of detachable and replaceable flexible electrode plates and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microchamber, which enables efficient and fast multiscale range particle manipulation. To expand the practicality of FDSA toward high-throughput acoustofluidics in a large-area microchamber, an arrayed micropillar structural support is designed to prevent the microchamber from collapsing and demonstrating no effect on the manipulation performance in the modified acoustic waves field. Overall, such FDSA retains the advantages of traditional acoustic tweezers, simplifies the processing and cost for diversified device design demands, and further facilitates subsequent biochemical analyses.