Lego bricks inspired a new way to shape devices for studying liquids
The design could lead to adaptable tools to study how fluids move
When building devices, engineers mostly use solids, such as metal or plastic. But not a team in China. Their building blocks are drops of water. With those drops, they’ve created a system to study and manage tiny flows of liquids. Best of all, these new devices are unusually easy to build, take apart and refashion.
Their inspiration? Legos, says Xin Du. He’s a biomechanical researcher at Southeast University in Nanjing, China and led the new work.
He recalls the day a student working on this project brought in some of his son’s toys. They were building blocks that snap together. “Is it possible for us to use the same principle to fabricate a device?” Du wondered. With Legos, he noted, someone can build something, then take it apart to build something else.
Such a system might work with fluids moving through tiny tubes. Called microfluidics, this field is important in many areas of science. It can be used to study how charged liquids flow through batteries, for example. Or it can be used to analyze chemical reactions. It can even model blood flow in the body.
Du’s group described this new system February 5 in Nature Chemical Engineering.