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

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.