Monday, April 25, 2016

Abstract-Quasi-Optical Terahertz Microfluidic Devices for Chemical Sensing and Imaging



1 Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 275 Fitzpatrick, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA2 Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Science, Wayne State University, 5050 Anthony Wayne Dr., Detroit, MI 48202, USA3 School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97330, USA
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Manabu Tokeshi
Received: 20 March 2016 / Revised: 18 April 2016 / Accepted: 21 April 2016 / Published: 25 April 2016

We first review the development of a frequency domain quasi-optical terahertz (THz) chemical sensing and imaging platform consisting of a quartz-based microfluidic subsystem in our previous work. We then report the application of this platform to sensing and characterizing of several selected liquid chemical samples from 570–630 GHz. THz sensing of chemical mixtures including isopropylalcohol-water (IPA-H2O) mixtures and acetonitrile-water (ACN-H2O) mixtures have been successfully demonstrated and the results have shown completely different hydrogen bond dynamics detected in different mixture systems. In addition, the developed platform has been applied to study molecule diffusion at the interface between adjacent liquids in the multi-stream laminar flow inside the microfluidic subsystem. The reported THz microfluidic platform promises real-time and label-free chemical/biological sensing and imaging with extremely broad bandwidth, high spectral resolution, and high spatial resolution.

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