Dr. Shamus McNamara - A Thermally Driven Pump for Microfluidic Applications - Dec 2, 2009

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Abstract: ;Microfluidic pumps are of great interest today for use in a variety of applications, including lab-on-a-chip, -TAS, gas chromatography, and gas spectroscopy. This talk will discuss a thermally driven gas pump, called a Knudsen Pump that features no moving parts. The pump can be operated to pull vacuum, or to compress a gas. Through pneumatic pressure, the pump can manipulate liquids in a microfluidic channel. The results from a number of pump configurations will be presented, including recent work that demonstrates the most efficient Knudsen pump reported to date.

Biography:  Shamus McNamara received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994 and 1996, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin- Madison in 2002. He did his post-doctoral work at the University of Michigan, and is a co-founder of a startup company. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he is also the associate director of the Micro-Nano Technology Center. His research interests lie in the fields of microfabrication and MEMS.