On-Demand Photothermal Bar-Chart Microfluidic Platform Using On-Chip Nanomaterial-Mediated Photothermal Effect as the Microfluidic Driving Force

A new type of microfluidic platforms, photothermal bar-chart chip (PT-Chip), has been developed using the on-chip nanomaterial-mediated photothermal effect as the novel tunable microfluidic driving force to drive ink bar charts in a visual quantitative readout fashion. This is the first time to exploit the nanomaterial-mediated photothermal effect for microfluidic pumping and also serves as the first report of the photothermal bar-chart microfluidic platform with wide microfluidic applications, especially for visual quantitative point-of-care detection.