Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
ÖZER M. B. (Yürütücü), YILDIRIM E., Çetin B.
TÜBİTAK Uluslararası İkili İşbirliği Projesi, 1071-Uluslararası Araştırma Fonlarından Yararlanma Kapasitesinin ve Uluslararası Ar-Ge İşbirliklerine Katılımın Arttırılmasına Yönelik Destek Programı, 2024 - 2026
Bioparticle separation is an important field that has significant implications in the fields of biology, bioengineering and medicine. In nearly the past two decades improved fabrication methods enabled microfluidic approaches in bioparticle separation to be more available, resulting in increased separation performance. There are several different approaches employed for the force used in separation including flow-induced drag, magnetic forces, dielectric forces, and acoustic forces. Even though the method of using acoustic radiation force for microparticle separation entered the literature rather later compared to other aforementioned methods, it has gained significant momentum in the last decade due to high throughput possibility and good separation performance.
Two basic approaches are used in acoustofluidic bioparticle manipulation applications. They are generating acoustic radiation force with bulk acoustic waves (BAW) and surface acoustic waves (SAW). The BAW approach uses ultrasonic frequency elastic waves to be generated in a chip material and the vibration of microchannel boundaries of the chip material generates an acoustic wave throughout the whole volume of the channel. The SAW approach on the other hand generates elastic waves at significantly higher frequencies compared to its BAW counterpart on the surface of a piezoelectric actuator. These surface elastic waves leak into the fluid inside the microchannel. There are advantages and disadvantages to each method. The BAW approach is simple to employ since it does not require a sophisticated interdigitated electrode pattern for actuation and since lower frequency ultrasonic waves are used the acoustic radiation force act on a larger region with higher radiation force amplitudes, on the other hand, lower frequency waves are less successful in separating bioparticles with similar properties. On the other hand, SAW has better specificity compared to BAW but lower flow rates and a more expensive microfluidic chip are required.
It has been observed that in the literature, an acoustophoretic chip that merges BAW and SAW approaches into a single device utilizing their corresponding advantages into a single acoustic microfluidic device is not investigated. This approach will result in a high specificity SAW chip operating at high flow rates due to decreased flow rate and decreased bioparticle loads due to the initial processing unit (BAW device) eliminating bioparticles that have clearly different acoustic properties than the bioparticles we aim to separate. Due to the lack of consumable and hardware fundings in this call, the major scope of the project includes only numerical modeling and design of the combined acoustophoretic even though experimental studies will be performed with the German team in Germany.
The project-related tasks are divided into six work packages. These work packages include determination of the requirements, the numerical modeling of the BAW device, the numerical modeling of the pre-alignment and achieving elastic wave isolation between the BAW and SAW devices. The design of the host chip structure and implementation of the BAW and SAW devices and actuators to the host chip and finally experimental testing of the new chip design.
The project team includes two groups, one from Türkiye including P.I. of the Turkish side Dr. M. Bülent Özer, and co-PI Dr. Ender Yıldırım from Middle East Technical University and co-PI Dr. Barbaros Çetin from Bilkent University. The partner from Germany is Dr. Ghulam Destgeer from the Technical University of Munich. The team is uniquely qualified to work on this project. Dr. Destgeer will participate in the project with his two Ph.D.students. The Turkish team has several publications on BAW devices, their analysis, design and implementation. On the other hand, Dr. Destgeer is one of the leading researchers in fabrication and implementation of SAW devices. Therefore, each group will be sharing their numerical analysis, fabrication processes with each other. This way as the Turkish team, we will gain an important understanding of the numerical simulation, analysis and fabrication of SAW devices which would take years for us to gain by ourselves. Similar gains on BAW devices are also true for the German side as well. We intend to be more competitive in the acoustofluidics field with this project and learning the knowledge, skills and know-how of each team will help us to apply for EU and TÜBİTAK-DFG joint projects with more competitive project proposals.
We intend to publish one joint conference paper that is sent to Acoustofluidics 2025 conference and send a journal article to a respected journal. Also, if we can show the feasibility of BAW-SAW integration which will result in a high throughput and high specificity acoustofluidic device, it will be an important contribution to the microfluidic bioparticle separation field. The next step will be implementing this approach to a biological and/or medical need where throughput and specificity are critical. With a useful implementation of the proposed approach, a new project proposal will be submitted to a competitive funding agency by the Turkish-German team.