Acoustic focusing of microplastics in microfabricated and steel tube devices: An experimental study on the effects from particle size and medium density

The contamination of aquatic systems with microplastics is becoming a severe threat to living organisms. Microplastics found in the environment consist of a wide range of particle sizes thus give rise to several challenges to current purification methods. Acoustic focusing has been utilized as a particle concentrating method in biological and non-biological applications. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of using acoustic focusing technology to isolate microplastics in aqueous samples and find that a two-stage mechanism is essential to concentrate microplastics of wide size ranges of the same material. We demonstrate for the first time experimentally that when the particle size is comparable to the resonance wavelength, they deviate from typical pressure nodal focusing and show pressure antinodal focusing. Further, we have expanded microplastics isolation beyond microfluidic systems and demonstrate their extraction capabilities relatively at higher flow rates using microplastics of polystyrene, polyethylene, and polymethyl methacrylate ranging from 6 mu m to 300 mu m diameter and in devices fabricated with cylindrical steel tubes. We could extract 70% of microplastics smaller than 180 mu m and 82% of microplastics greater than 180 mu m in diameter from an aqueous sample at a flow rate of 12 mL/min. We demonstrate that small microplastics focus on acoustic pressure nodes regardless of the medium density. However, focusing of large microplastics of the same material depends on the medium density.

Automated summary

The contamination of aquatic systems with microplastics poses a severe threat to living organisms. Current purification methods face challenges due to the wide range of particle sizes. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using acoustic focusing technology to isolate microplastics in aqueous samples, and reveals the influence of particle size on the focusing effect.