A microfluidic band-pass filter for flexible fiber separation

Abstract

The control of particle trajectories in structured microfluidic environments has significantly advanced sorting technologies, most notably through deterministic lateral displacement (DLD). While previous works have largely targeted rigid, near-spherical particles, the sorting of flexible, anisotropic objects such as fibers remains largely unexplored. Here, we combine experiments and simulations to demonstrate how tilted pillar arrays enable efficient, length-based separation of flexible fibers. We find that these arrays act as band-pass filters, selectively inducing lateral migration in fibers whose lengths are close to the array period. Fibers significantly shorter or longer exhibit small lateral deviation. This migration arises from the interplay of fluid–structure interactions between fibers and the complex flow and steric interactions with the pillars. Depending on their length, fibers exhibit distinct transport regimes: short fibers zigzag in between pillars following the flow, intermediate length fibers exhibit wrapping and jumping from one pillar to another, leading to lateral displacement, and long fibers deform extensively, following mixed zigzag-jump trajectories with small lateral migration. We identify the mechanical tension that develops in the fiber when wrapped around the pillars as the driving mechanism of cross-streamline transport. Leveraging this band-pass effect, we designed a highly efficient separation device to collect monodisperse fiber suspensions. Our findings not only expand the functional scope of DLD-like systems but also open avenues for understanding transport of anisotropic objects in porous media.