A Fabrication of a Novel Microfluidic Reactor Microsynthesis of MIP's Particles

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J9.4.1

A Fabrication of a Novel Microfluidic Reactor Microsynthesis of MIP’s Particles Kyung M. Choi, John A. Rogers, and Kenneth J. Shea Department of Chemistry, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, U.S.A; Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, New Jersey, 07974, U.S.A.; Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL 61801, U. S.A.

Microfabrication offers us the ability to fabricate numerous active devices at the microscale by patterning features on a variety of substrates for developing small devices in nanotechnology. Since materials scientists and chemists have been looking for unconventional approaches in the synthesis of novel materials, we introduce here a novel strategy of fabricating microfluidic reactors. A new microfluidic reactor was designed and fabricated for the microscale synthesis of materials, which has not been possible from conventional bulk syntheses. The microreactor presents a continuous, dynamic droplet generation. Using the microfluidic reactor, we demonstrate here a microfluidic synthesis of molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP), which is useful for bio- or chemical sensor applications due to its specific molecular recognition functions. Since the particle size of MIP’s system directly affects their affinity capability in molecular recognitions, uniform MIPs’ particles at the nano- or micro-scale were produced via the microfluidic technique to achieve high sensitivity by developing ‘monoclonal’ MIPs particles, which have only high affinity binding sites.

INTRODUCTION In nanotechnology, fabricating smaller and more compact devices allows us to achieve new advances, which satisfy our growing demands in miniaturization.1-3 Nano- or microfabrication technique has been widely used to fabricate small devices on a variety of substrates. Due to stringent requirements for high resolutions and high fidelity in nanofabrications and also the need for high performance in nano-devices, incentive challenges in the development of new materials and novel fabrication techniques currently lead this technology. Recently, new technologies such as soft lithography or microfluidic synthesis have gotten attention to expand the applications and the scope of nanotechnology.4-6 In this area, there are a lot of challenges for chemists and materials scientist to play an important role in the development of new materials since nanotechnology is a part of the chemical domain, which builds up materials at the molecular level. For example, a number of nano-particles and functional polymers have been synthesized and utilized in nanotechnology.7-9 Since conventional wet chemical synthesis is limited for unconventional applications, we focused here on a novel synthesis through microfluidic approaches.

J9.4.2

Microfluidic synthesis has gotten a lot of attention for synthesizing novel materials since microfluidic reactors offer us unique advantages, which can’t be achieved via conventional synthetic routes. We are interested in this technology because, fo