Microfluidic microwave heating

Integrated microfluidic-microwave devices for rapid sample heating.

There have been a great number of macroscale fluidic techniques which have been successfully miniaturised to take advantage of scaling effects. However to date there are limited reports of successful exploitation of the greatly reduced heat capacities of micro devices.

It is well known that water absorbs microwave energy very efficiently due to its permanent molecular dipole which has large dielectric losses in the GHz frequency range.

To this end we are investigating the design of integrated microfluidic devices employed to rapidly and precisely heat water by means of near-field microwave dielectric heating.