Tag Archives: surface acoustic waves

Using acoustic waves to move fluids at the nanoscale

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A Nov. 14, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily describes research that could lead to applications useful for ‘lab-on-a-chip’ operations,

A team of mechanical engineers at the University of California San Diego [UCSD] has successfully used acoustic waves to move fluids through small channels at the nanoscale. The breakthrough is a first step toward the manufacturing of small, portable devices that could be used for drug discovery and microrobotics applications. The devices could be integrated in a lab on a chip to sort cells, move liquids, manipulate particles and sense other biological components. For example, it could be used to filter a wide range of particles, such as bacteria, to conduct rapid diagnosis.

A Nov. 14, 2016 UCSD news release (also on EurrekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more information,

The researchers detail their findings in the Nov. 14 issue of Advanced Functional Materials. This is the first time that surface acoustic waves have been used at the nanoscale.

The field of nanofluidics has long struggled with moving fluids within channels that are 1000 times smaller than the width of a hair, said James Friend, a professor and materials science expert at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Current methods require bulky and expensive equipment as well as high temperatures. Moving fluid out of a channel that’s just a few nanometers high requires pressures of 1 megaPascal, or the equivalent of 10 atmospheres.

Researchers led by Friend had tried to use acoustic waves to move the fluids along at the nano scale for several years. They also wanted to do this with a device that could be manufactured at room temperature.

After a year of experimenting, post-doctoral researcher Morteza Miansari, now at Stanford, was able to build a device made of lithium niobate with nanoscale channels where fluids can be moved by surface acoustic waves. This was made possible by a new method Miansari developed to bond the material to itself at room temperature.  The fabrication method can be easily scaled up, which would lower manufacturing costs. Building one device would cost $1000 but building 100,000 would drive the price down to $1 each.

The device is compatible with biological materials, cells and molecules.

Researchers used acoustic waves with a frequency of 20 megaHertz to manipulate fluids, droplets and particles in nanoslits that are 50 to 250 nanometers tall. To fill the channels, researchers applied the acoustic waves in the same direction as the fluid moving into the channels. To drain the channels, the sound waves were applied in the opposite direction.

By changing the height of the channels, the device could be used to filter a wide range of particles, down to large biomolecules such as siRNA, which would not fit in the slits. Essentially, the acoustic waves would drive fluids containing the particles into these channels. But while the fluid would go through, the particles would be left behind and form a dry mass. This could be used for rapid diagnosis in the field.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Acoustic Nanofluidics via Room-Temperature Lithium Niobate Bonding: A Platform for Actuation and Manipulation of Nanoconfined Fluids and Particles by Morteza Miansari and James R. Friend. Advanced Functional Materials DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201602425 Version of Record online: 20 SEP 2016
© 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

They do have an animation sequence illustrating the work but it could be considered suggestive and is, weirdly, silent,

 

 

The sound of moving data

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In fact, scientists from the University of Sheffield (UK) and the University of Leeds (UK) have found a way to move data easily and quickly by using sound waves. From a Nov. 3, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily,

Nothing is more frustrating that watching that circle spinning in the centre of your screen, while you wait for your computer to load a programme or access the data you need. Now a team from the Universities of Sheffield and Leeds may have found the answer to faster computing: sound.

The research — published in Applied Physics Letters — has shown that certain types of sound waves can move data quickly, using minimal power.

A Nov. 3, 2015 University of Sheffield news release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, explains some of the issues with data and memory before briefly describing how sound waves could provide a solution,

The world’s 2.7 zettabytes (2.7 followed by 21 zeros) of data are mostly held on hard disk drives: magnetic disks that work like miniaturised record players, with the data read by sensors that scan over the disk’s surface as it spins. But because this involves moving parts, there are limits on how fast it can operate.

For computers to run faster, we need to create “solid-state” drives that eliminate the need for moving parts – essentially making the data move, not the device on which it’s stored. Flash-based solid-state disk drives have achieved this, and store information electrically rather than magnetically. However, while they operate much faster than normal hard disks, they last much less time before becoming unreliable, are much more expensive and still run much slower than other parts of a modern computer – limiting total speed.

Creating a magnetic solid-state drive could overcome all of these problems. One solution being developed is ‘racetrack memory’, which uses tiny magnetic wires, each one hundreds of times thinner than a human hair, down which magnetic “bits” of data run like racing cars around a track. Existing research into racetrack memory has focused on using magnetic fields or electric currents to move the data bits down the wires. However, both these options create heat and reduce power efficiency, which will limit battery life, increase energy bills and CO2 emissions.

Dr Tom Hayward from the University of Sheffield and Professor John Cunningham from the University of Leeds have together come up with a completely new solution: passing sound waves across the surface on which the wires are fixed. They also found that the direction of data flow depends on the pitch of the sound generated – in effect they “sang” to the data to move it.

The sound used is in the form of surface acoustic waves – the same as the most destructive wave that can emanate from an earthquake. Although already harnessed for use in electronics and other areas of engineering, this is the first time surface acoustic waves have been applied to a data storage system.

Dr Hayward, from Sheffield’s Faculty of Engineering, said: “The key advantage of surface acoustic waves in this application is their ability to travel up to several centimetres without decaying, which at the nano-scale is a huge distance. Because of this, we think a single sound wave could be used to “sing” to large numbers of nanowires simultaneously, enabling us to move a lot of data using very little power. We’re now aiming to create prototype devices in which this concept can be fully tested.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

A sound idea: Manipulating domain walls in magnetic nanowires using surface acoustic waves by J. Dean, M. T. Bryan, J. D. Cooper, A. Virbule, J. E. Cunningham, and T. J. Hayward. Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 142405 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4932057

This is an open access paper.

Dexter Johnson in a Nov. 5, 2015 posting on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) provides a few additional details about the work such as a brief mention of IBM’s work developing racetrack memory, also known as, a non-volatile memory device.