Measuring flow rate with a «Coulter» counter
Alessandro Gadaleta and Anne-Laure Biance (team Liquid at Interfaces), in collaboration with colleagues from ENS in Paris, have published an article entitled "Ultra-sensitive flow measurement in individual nanopores through pressure-driven particle translocation" in Nanoscale.
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In this work, the authors designed a technique to measure extremely small flow rates, of the order of a few femto-liters per second. They used the famous Coulter counter technique (1953), aiming at detecting electrically a probe (here a nanobead) blocking partially an orifice. By counting the number of beads going through the pore per second and the dwell time of each bead inside the hole, a hydrodynamic permeability can be measured. This technique opens new ways to measure flux through nanotubes or nanochannels. The authors thank the platform CLYM and Rémy Fulcrand for pore drilling. |
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02/04/2015