Contactless Ultrasound Droplet Manipulation System for Mixing Chemical Reagents

Under the advocate of green chemistry guidelines, It became a tendency that reduces the waste of consumables and chemical solutions, and ensuring the safety of operators is also an important issue. Based on the above, non-contact droplet mixing technology has gained prominence. It is observed that the commercial devices currently on the market are subject to the design, the storage tank is facing downward, and the volume of the solution that can be operated is very small. Therefore, in this paper, an innovative idea is proposed to realize the non-contact droplet manipulation system. By integrating two methods which previously raised, Acoustic Droplet Ejection method and Acoustic Droplet levitation method. The target solution can be ejected to a certain position in the form of particles, and captured and transported by the levitation device, the target droplet will be controlled and finally reach the destination, enter the storage sink and wait for the next droplet which we expect to mix. In this paper, serval experiments have been conducted to verify the proposed method, Besides, acoustic field simulation was also performed to visualize and quantify the presence of focal point in the levitation device and the ejection system. The experimental results included demonstrating two different solutions, capturing and transporting the target droplet successfully, which proved the ejecting and levitating capability of the proposed method. Moreover, the results of the simulation also proved that the proposed approach could successfully create acoustic traps and focal points.