Figure 1

(a) Schematic of the microfluidic device with an inlet reservoir and 165 parallel microchannels. The channels are \(\sim\) 5 cm long and taper from 40 μm at the inlet to 4 μm at the outlet, with a taper angle of \(\sim 0.02^{\circ }\). The insets show the channel width at inlet and outlet; the outlet region is where the evolution of fluorescence intensity is monitored over time. (b) Flow test setup: a constant pressure is applied to the reservoir containing the suspension by a clean air supply. The flowrate is measured per unit time by an inline flow meter and the data is collected online. The driving pressure is approximately equal to the pressure drop across system since the fluid exiting the microfluidic device is at atmospheric pressure.