Glass microwave microfluidic devices for broadband characterization of diverse fluids

Published

November 15, 2024

Author(s)

Jacob Pawlik, Tomasz Karpisz, Yasaman Kazemipour, Nicholas Derimow, Sarah Evans, Bryan Bosworth, Christian Long, Nathan Orloff, James Booth, Angela Stelson

Abstract

We demonstrate a glass microwave microfluidic device for determining the permittivity of a wide range of liquid chemicals from 100 MHz to 10 GHz with relatively low uncertainty. Conventional microwave microfluidic devices use polymer-based microfluidic layers for fluid delivery, but these polymers swell in organic solvents and are not suitable for many applications. Our device incorporates glass microfluidic channels with platinum coplanar waveguides to provide a solvent-resistant architecture for broadband dielectric spectroscopy of fluids. We utilize broadband S-parameter measurements with a vector network analyzer on a wafer probing station and multiline thru-reflect-line calibrations to extract the distributed circuit parameters of transmission lines and solve for fluid permittivity. In this work, we demonstrate the utility of the device by measuring the broadband permittivity of four organic solvents difficult to measure otherwise: hexane, heptane, decane, and toluene.

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques

Volume

73

Issue

1

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/TMTT.2024.3491653

Local Download

Keywords

Glass microfluidics, microwave devices, dielectric spectroscopy, permittivity

Citation

Pawlik, J. , Karpisz, T. , Kazemipour, Y. , Derimow, N. , Evans, S. , Bosworth, B. , Long, C. , Orloff, N. , Booth, J. and Stelson, A. (2024), Glass microwave microfluidic devices for broadband characterization of diverse fluids, IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/TMTT.2024.3491653, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=958158 (Accessed October 16, 2025)