The Collection Method for Crop Fungal Spores Based on an Efficient Microfluidic Device

Pan Wang ； Shouqi Yuan ； Ning Yang ； Aiying Wang ； Alexander Fordjour ； Shengbo Chen

《Aerosol and Air Quality Research》 20卷1期 (2020/01) Pp. 72-79

https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2019.08.0424

摘要

Nowadays, the airborne fungal spores have always taken an important role in the spread of crop fungal diseases and caused great concern. In this study, a novel efficient microfluidic chip for enriching the airborne fungal spores directly from gas flow was developed, which has better portability and cost-efficiency. The chip consists of three parts: half-wave pretreatment channel, inertial impactor, and low-pressure collection chamber. During the collection process, the particles were arranged in the radial position of the half-wave pretreatment channel based on their sizes, then separated by the inertial impactor and collected in the low-pressure collection chamber. The size distribution of the collected target was calculated by image process and recognition. The results show that the cut-off sizes of the proposed microfluidic device was found to be 4.83 μm (first-stage) and 0.98 μm (second-stage), respectively. The sharpness of the first and the second-stage collection efficiency curves were 1.31 and 1.79 respectively. The bounce effects and re-entrainment of particles can be eliminated by the low-pressure collection chamber without any silicon oil or grease. The collection reproducibility is acceptable. As a result, the proposed microfluidic chip can realize the crop fungal spore collection efficiently and can be used to improve the development of real-time crop fungal diseases monitoring technology.

關鍵字

Crop fungal spores ； Microfluidics ； Separation performance ； Pretreatment