Controlled viscous fingering in volatile fluid towards spontaneous evolution of ordered 3D patterns.

Mimicking nature using artificial technologies has always been a quest/fascination of scientists and researchers of all eras. This paper characterizes viscous fingering instability-based, lithography-less, spontaneous, and scalable process towards fabrication of 3D patterns like nature-inspired honeycomb structures with ultra-high aspect ratio walls. Rich experimental characterization data on volatile polymer solution evolution in a uniport lifted Hele-Shaw cell (ULHSC) is represented on a non-dimensional phase plot.

Scalable large-area mesh-structured microfluidic gradient generator for drug testing applications.

Microfluidic concentration gradient generators are useful in drug testing, drug screening, and other cellular applications to avoid manual errors, save time, and labor. However, expensive fabrication techniques make such devices prohibitively costly. Here, in the present work, we developed a microfluidic concentration gradient generator (μCGG) using a recently proposed non-conventional photolithography-less method.