Observation of biological samples is a common issue in many applications relative to marine environment and in the field of water treatments. In particular, the ability to detect the presence of bacteria such as Criptosporidium and Giardia Lamblia in freshwater contributes to prevent people from critical diseases even in developed countries. The main challenge in this field is to analyze a large enough volume of biological sample to make it representative of the selected environment, while characterizing the species of interest whose size is often many order of magnitude smaller.
In order to obtain detailed information of the observed species, the magnification of the visualization systems — often optical microscopes — should fit the size of the objects, involving a restrained field of view. As a result; the rate of analysis is lowered and the characterization of the samples time-consuming. To tackle this issue, an increase of the flow rate is possible by focusing of particles in the observation field of view. Such technique allows for increasing the overall flow rate, inversely related to the sampling time.
In this article a new 3D hydrofocusing device is presented. A square section glass capillary (400×400μm2) used as the nozzle is inserted into a square section glass channel (2×2mm2). The inlets are fixed on a custom device that enables the sheath flow to completely wrap the sample flow after the injection. The 3D position of the particles used as representative substitutes of the biological species has been measured thanks to digital holographic microscopy and their distribution in cross-sections 2mm and 30mm downstream the injection nozzle compared to numerical simulations. A successful match of the location has been observed.
The carrier fluid used in the experiments was water seeded with 27–45μm diameter neutrally buoyant particles. Several flow rates have been tested for both samples and sheath flow to investigate the shape of the focused stream line and to validate the prototype design. A maximum constriction — ratio between the part of the cross-sections where particles are present with and without focusing sheath flow — of 47% has been observed confirming the potentiality of the technique.
