Sungjae Kim

Ion concentration polarization (ICP) is a fundamental electrokinetic process that occurs near a perm-selective membrane under dc bias. Overall process highly depends on the current transportation mechanisms such as electro-convection, surface conduction and diffusioosmosis and the fundamental characteristics can be significantly altered by external parameters, once the permselectivity was fixed. In this work, a new ICP device with a bifurcated current path as for the enhancement of the surface c

A perm-selective nanochannel could initiate concentration polarization near the nanochannel, significantly decreasing (increasing) the ion concentration in the anodic (cathodic) end of the nanochannel. Such strong concentration polarization can be induced even at moderate buffer concentrations because of local ion depletion (therefore thicker local Debye layer) near the nanochannel. In addition, fast fluid vortices were generated at the anodic side of the nanochannel due to the nonequilibrium el

Recently, a new type of electrokinetic concentration devices has been developed in a microfluidic chip format, which allows efficient trapping and concentration of biomolecules by utilizing ion concentration polarization near nanofluidic structures. These devices have drawn much attention not only due to their potential application in biomolecule sensing, but also due to the rich scientific content related to ion concentration polarization, the underlying physical phenomenon for the operation of

Ion concentration polarization is the fundamental transport phenomenon that occurs near ion-selective membranes, but this important membrane phenomenon has been poorly understood due to theoretical and experimental challenges. Here, we report the first direct measurements of detailed flow and electric potential profiles within and near the depletion region. This work is an important step toward a full characterization of this coupled transport problem. Using microfabricated electrodes integrated

We developed a reliable but simple integration method of polymeric nanostructure in a poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS)-based microfluidic channel, for nanofluidic applications. The Nafion polymer junction was creased by infiltrating polymer solution between the gaps created by mechanical cutting, without any photolithography or etching processes. The PDMS can seal itself with the heterogeneous polymeric nanoporous material between the PDMS/PDMS gap due to its flexibility without any (covalent) bond

In this work, we investigated multiple vortical flows inside the ion concentration polarization (ICP) layer that forms due to a coupling of applied electric fields and the semipermeable nanoporous junction between microchannels. While only a primary vortex near perm-selective membrane is traditionally known to lead to electrokinetic instability, multiple vortexes induced by the primary vortex were found to play a major role in the electrokinetic instability. The existence of multiple vortexes wa

Recently, tremendous engineering applications utilizing new physics of nanoscale electrokinetics have been reported and their basic fundamentals are actively researched. In this work, we first report a simple and economic but reliable nanochannel fabrication technique, leading to a heterogeneously charged triangular nanochannel. The nanochannel utilized the elasticity of PDMS when it bonded with a micrometer-scale structure on a substrate. Second, we successfully demonstrated novel ionic transpo

The-state-of-the-art bio- and nanotechnology have opened up an avenue to noninvasive liquid biopsy for identifying diseases from biomolecules in bloodstream, especially DNA. In this work, we combined sequence-specific-labeling scheme using mutated clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats associated protein 9 without endonuclease activity (CRISPR/dCas9) and ion concentration polarization (ICP) phenomenon as a mechanism to selectively preconcentrate targeted DNA molecules for rapi

Online collection of selectivity preconcentrated analytes was demonstrated utilizing ion concentration polarization phenomena and pneumatic valve system.

In this work, we experimentally investigated an effect of the hydrodynamic convective flow on ion transport through a nanoporous membrane in a micro/nanofluidic modeled system. The convective motion of ions in an ion concentration polarization (ICP) layer was controlled by external hydrodynamic inflows adjacent to the nanoporous membrane. The ion depletion region, which is regarded as a high electrical resistance, was spatially confined to a triangular shape with the additional hydrodynamic conv

It has been observed that colloidal particles are anomalously repelled from the interface of nanoporous materials and water by up to hundreds of micrometers even if there is no additional external field present. Recently, the physical origin of this anomalous repulsion has turned out to be diffusiophoretic migration triggered by an ion exchange process through the interface. Since the repulsive force is induced by a salt gradient only, the phenomenon can be applied to a microscale water purifica

Ion concentration polarization (ICP) has been extensively researched concerning new fundamentals in nanoscale electrokinetics and novel engineering applications. While biomedical and environmental ICP applications have a number of advantages compared to conventional methods, the technique has suffered from the critical limitation of low processing capacity because it has been usually presented in a micro/nanofluidic platform. In this paper, we devised micro fin structures inside a macroscale hig

In this paper, we developed a versatile ionic field effect transistor (IFET) which has an ambipolar function for manipulating molecules regardless of their polarity and can be operated at a wide range of electrolytic concentrations (10(-5) M-1 M). The IFET has circular nanochannels radially covered by gate electrodes, called "all-around-gate", with an aluminum oxide (Al2O3) oxide layer of a near-zero surface charge. Experimental and numerical validations were conducted for characterizing the IFE