Leslie Y. Yeo

This article reviews acoustic microfluidics: the use of acoustic fields, principally ultrasonics, for application in microfluidics. Although acoustics is a classical field, its promising, and indeed perplexing, capabilities in powerfully manipulating both fluids and particles within those fluids on the microscale to nanoscale has revived interest in it. The bewildering state of the literature and ample jargon from decades of research is reorganized and presented in the context of models derived from first principles. This hopefully will make the area accessible for researchers with experience in materials science, fluid mechanics, or dynamics. The abundance of interesting phenomena arising from nonlinear interactions in ultrasound that easily appear at these small scales is considered, especially in surface acoustic wave devices that are simple to fabricate with planar lithography techniques common in microfluidics, along with the many applications in microfluidics and nanofluidics that appear through the literature.

Harnessing the ability to precisely and reproducibly actuate fluids and manipulate bioparticles such as DNA, cells, and molecules at the microscale, microfluidics is a powerful tool that is currently revolutionizing chemical and biological analysis by replicating laboratory bench-top technology on a miniature chip-scale device, thus allowing assays to be carried out at a fraction of the time and cost while affording portability and field-use capability. Emerging from a decade of research and development in microfluidic technology are a wide range of promising laboratory and consumer biotechnological applications from microscale genetic and proteomic analysis kits, cell culture and manipulation platforms, biosensors, and pathogen detection systems to point-of-care diagnostic devices, high-throughput combinatorial drug screening platforms, schemes for targeted drug delivery and advanced therapeutics, and novel biomaterials synthesis for tissue engineering. The developments associated with these technological advances along with their respective applications to date are reviewed from a broad perspective and possible future directions that could arise from the current state of the art are discussed.

Fluid manipulations at the microscale and beyond are powerfully enabled through the use of 10–1,000-MHz acoustic waves. A superior alternative in many cases to other microfluidic actuation techniques, such high-frequency acoustics is almost universally produced by surface acoustic wave devices that employ electromechanical transduction in wafer-scale or thin-film piezoelectric media to generate the kinetic energy needed to transport and manipulate fluids placed in adjacent microfluidic structures. These waves are responsible for a diverse range of complex fluid transport phenomena—from interfacial fluid vibration and drop and confined fluid transport to jetting and atomization—underlying a flourishing research literature spanning fundamental fluid physics to chip-scale engineering applications. We highlight some of this literature to provide the reader with a historical basis, routes for more detailed study, and an impression of the field's future directions.

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is nearly ubiquitous in microfluidic devices, being easy to work with, economical, and transparent. A detailed protocol is provided here for using PDMS in the fabrication of microfluidic devices to aid those interested in using the material in their work, with information on the many potential ways the material may be used for novel devices.