Femtosecond Laser Ablated Tracks on Smart Surfaces for Droplet Manipulation Applications

In droplet based microfluidics, ability of controlling the motion of the droplets insidechips have great importance for the applications such guiding, sorting, mixing and dividing of liquid droplets. In this study, we fabricated hydrophilic microchannels inside the chips by femtosecond laser ablation technique in order to control droplet motion. The laser beam focused on PDMS converts the irradiated regions to hydrophilic by ablating the coating entirely from the surface. Droplets follow the tracks because of the difference in wettability of ablated region and PDMS surfaces together with the topographical profile of the ablated tracks. Within this study, we investigated the manipulation of three kind of liquid droplets (water/surfactant mixture, pure water and pure etylene glycol) along microchannels with depths of 1μm, 1.5μm and 2μm. We verified the experimental results with simulations and analyzed the trajectories of the moving droplets with the different wettability along the tracks of different depths. Our results showed that, while topographical effects play role in droplet guiding for 1.5μm and 2μm tracks, for the case of 1μm depth of channel, surface energy modifications cause the guiding rather than the topographical step on the surface. These results will pioneer for sorting applications of different micro droplets mixed in the same microfluidic chip.