High-Efficiency Enrichment of Metallic Particles in Lubricating Oil Based on Filter-Free Acoustic Manipulation Chip

Enrichment of metal particles in lubricating oil is a crucial pretreatment for wear debris analyses in applications of condition-based machinery maintenance. Current techniques using physical filter cleaning and magnetic attachment to enrich metal particles have limitations in terms of efficiency and selectivity. This work presents an innovative acoustic manipulation chip for efficiently enriching metallic particles from lubricating oil. The platform utilizes the hybrid acoustic forces to perform high throughput particle enrichment in microchannels, even in an intensive flow environment. Regarding the viscosity effect of lubricating oil, the temperature dependence upon the particle enrichment is explored, and the figure of merit is employed to quantify the enrichment performance from the captured microscopic images. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed platform shows great nonselectivity for enriching both magnetic and nonmagnetic particles. This method opens a new door for developing automatic filter-free pretreatment tools to perform efficient particle enrichment in lubricating oil, which have great potential in many application scenarios, such as advanced wear debris analyses, oil quality monitoring, etc.