Tech Talk – Light or Fiber Touch

All members of the HKU community and the general public are welcome to join!
Speaker: Professor Liqiu Wang, Chair Professor of Thermal-Fluid Sciences and Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, HKU
Date: 16th June 2022 (Thursday)
Time: 4:30pm
Register now!
About the Tech Talk
Speaker: Professor Liqiu Wang, Chair Professor of Thermal-Fluid Sciences and Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, HKU
Mode: Mixed
Moderator: Professor X.Y. Li, Chair Professor of Water and Environmental Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, HKU  
Date: 16th June 2022 (Thursday)
Time: 4:30pm 
Venue: Inno Wing Two / Zoom
Language: English
Precision manipulation of various liquids is essential in many fields, including DNA analysis, proteomics, cell assay and clinical diagnosis, chemical synthesis, and drug discovery. Their divisible, sticky, and sometime infectious features impose, however, great challenges on processing them, particularly when their volume is down to nano-/subnano-liter. A blood droplet from an Ebola patient can for example infect medical workers through the skin. For diagnosis, medical workers have to crash, filter, and purify a patient’s blood sample to obtain the virus’s genetic materials. This series of operations, very often in a fluidic medium, is highly infectious. Moreover, fluids stick to surfaces, which will contaminate containers and handling tools, causing potential dangers if the medical wastes are not properly managed. In this talk, Prof. Wang shall demonstrate how a simple light or fiber touch functions as a “magic” wetting-proof hand to navigate, fuse, pinch, and cleave fluids on demand, being capable of reducing and even replacing the usage of disposable plastics in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.
Droplet manipulator
Droplet manipulators
Droplets
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Registration
  • The tech talk “Light or Fiber Touch” will be organized in the Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two (G/F, Run Run Shaw Building, HKU) on 16th June 2022 (Thursday), 4:30 pm.
  • Seats are limited. Zoom broadcast is available if the seating quota is full. 
  • Registrants on the waiting list will be notified of the arrangement after the registration deadline (with seating/free-standing/other arrangement)
  • Please read the Enhanced Covid-19 control measures at HKU for entering the HKU campus (https://covid19.hku.hk/announcements/all/2022/04/13776/)

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Recording of the Tech Talk​
About the speaker

Professor Liqiu Wang

Prof. Liqiu Wang is a chair professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Biomedical Engineering Programme at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He has 25 years of HKU experience in transport phenomena, biomedical engineering, materials, nanotechnology, biotechnology, energy and environment, thermal and power engineering, and mathematics, and ~2 years of industry experience in technology and IP development, management, and transfer as a Chief Scientist and CTO. Prof. Wang has developed, with an international team consisting of about 100 scientists and engineers, a state-of-the-art thermal control system for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) on the International Space Station that ensures AMS and all its sub-detectors working at their designed temperatures ±1℃ for an environment temperature variation from -40℃ to 60℃ every 90 minutes. His work has been widely featured by local, national, and international media, journals, and magazines, and received recognition through a number of awards.
About the project

Light-controlled Contamination-free Fluidic Processor

The fluidic processor resembles a “magic” optical hand that can navigate, fuse, pinch, and cleave fluids in lossfree manner. Fluid placed on the device beads up like a marble and readily rolls without residue. By illuminating laser on the platform, a wavy force field is generated, acting as an invisible hand to touch and manipulate fluid.

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