J. Dehmoune, Ingénieur, Docteur en physique.

Microevaporators with accumulators for the screening of phase diagrams of aqueous solutions

P. Moreau, J. Dehmoune, J.-B. Salmon, and J. Leng

Laboratory of the Future (CNRS/Rhodia UMR 5258), Université Bordeaux-1, 33608 Pessac, France
Received 23 April 2009 ; accepted 31 May 2009 ; published online 21 July 2009
We design near-autonomous microfluidic devices for concentrating aqueous solutions steadily over days in a very controlled manner.We combine suction pumps that drive the solution and concentrate it steadily, with a nanoliter-sized storage pool where the solute accumulates. The fine balance between advection and diffusion in the pump and diffusion alone in the accumulation pool yields several filling regimes. One of them is universal as being steady and independent of the solute itself. It results a specific equivalence between time and concentration, which we use to build the phase quantitative diagram of a ternary aqueous solution on nanoliter scale.
American Institute of Physics. DOI : 10.1063/1.3159811

Moreau et al. APL (2009)

Video of the liquid-liquid transition