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Glass microwave microfluidic devices for broadband characterization of diverse fluids
Published
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
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 8, 2025)