Spontaneous Selective Preconcentration Leveraged by Ion Exchange and Imbibition through Nanoporous Medium

Abstract Manipulating mechanism of particle’s motion has been extensively studied for the sample preparation in microfluidic applications including diagnostics, food industries, biological analyses and environmental monitoring. However, most of conventional methods need additional external forces such as electric field or pressure and complicated channel designs, which demand highly complex fabrication processes and operation strategies. In addition, these methods have inherent limitations of dilution or mixing during separation or preconcentration step, respectively, so that a number of studies have reported an efficient selective preconcentration process, i.e. conducting the separation and preconcentration simultaneously. In this work, a power-free spontaneous selective preconcentration method was suggested based on leveraging convective flow over diffusiophoresis near the water-absorb…