High throughout concentration of bacteria by acoustofluidic chip

• Main Author: Lee, Quo Way
• Other Authors: Fan Weijun
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/71939
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The degradation of water quality leading to waterborne diseases can be deadly and has a significant impact on population health claiming approximately five million lives in a year globally. Microbial contamination in water causes detrimental effects not only to human health but also business performance of industries by compromising the quality of finished products. Conventional water quality monitoring techniques often require many hours of labour such as culture enrichment and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to enrich the targeted micro-organism for identification and quantification. This results in limitations to the implementation of routine water analysis procedures. The water industries are actively looking for rapid detection systems for microbes like giardia and cryptosporidium which causes a significant amount of waterborne diseases in the developed world. One of the major obstacle to creating a rapid detection system is the low concentration of micro-organism in water which leads to the usage of additional laboratory procedures for enrichment and concentration prior to analysis. Therefore, technological advances are needed for a quicker detection of microbes in water quality monitoring systems. Microfluidics concentrators such as the acoustofluidic system is developed as an alternative to the conventional monitoring systems. Acoustofluidic system uses the thin-reflector resonator to generate an acoustic radiation force which helps to concentrate bio-particles for further analysis. It can also be integrated along with a monitoring system, which increases the efficiency of microbes detection compared to the conventional methods. Hence, in this project, an acoustofluidic system will be designed and fabricated based on available designs and parameters. A new type of material (silicon) will be used for the carrier layer which no experiments known as of date has utilized. Further analysis will be conducted on the silicon acoustofluidic system to determine the optimal working parameters for the best recovery and efficiency. The report will also include the discussion of results and future recommendations for the silicon acoustofluidic system.