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Study of serial separations by acoustophoresis toward microplastic enrichment
Summary
A microfluidic acoustic focusing system was designed to enrich microplastics from laundry wastewater by concentrating particles toward the center of a channel using acoustic force. Running the separation four times in series achieved over 100-fold concentration of microplastics, suggesting a viable method for isolating microplastics from dilute water samples.
Plastic has become an essential part of modern life. In recent years, microplastics, less than 5mm plastics, have been rising an international environmental issue. Above all, laundry wastewater is considered to be one of the largest sources of microplastics. In this study, we designed the microchannel network to separate microplastics from laundry wastewater based on acoustic focusing. In a microchannel, microplastics focused at the center of the flow channel by acoustic force are drained only from the center channel at the tree-branch channel. When 1/3.2 of the total flow goes into the center channel, microplastic suspension is concentrated 3.2 times. By performing this process four times, microplastic solution will be concentrated over 100 times. The flow model of serial separations was designed with 3D CAD software and was analyzed by COMSOL Multiphysics. The simulation result showed that the designed microchannel combined with acoustic focusing would concentrate the microplastic suspension by over 100 times.