Textile-based microfluidics: modulated wetting, mixing, sorting, and energy harvesting

Microfluidics technology allows us to perform rapid and massively parallel manipulation and characterization of fluid samples with biomedical and environmental importance. In the attempt to achieve resource-efficient fabrication and operation of the microfluidic devices, paper-based and thread-based microfluidics have been previously demonstrated by other researchers. We propose to develop textile-based microfluidics, formed by three-dimensional networks of individual threads, to further advance the ability of paper-based and thread-based microfluidics. This paper describes four different phenomena that we investigate in textile-based microfluidic systems: modulated wetting, liquid mixing, liquid sorting, and energy harvesting. Our results indicate the feasibility of textiles as a new platform to develop low-cost microfluidic technology.