Elastocapillary sequential fluid capture in hummingbird-inspired grooved sheets

Passive and effective fluid capture and transport at small scale is crucial for industrial and medical applications, especially for the realisation of point-of-care tests. Performing these tests involves several steps, including capturing biological fluid, aliquoting, reacting with reagents, and reading the results. Ideally, these tests must be fast and offer a large surface-to-volume ratio to achieve rapid and precise diagnostics with a reduced amount of fluid. Such constraints are often contradictory as a high surface-to-volume ratio implies a high hydraulic resistance and hence a decrease in the flow rate. Inspired by the feeding mechanism of hummingbirds, we propose a frugal fluid capture device that takes advantage of elastocapillary deformations to enable concomitant fast liquid transport, aliquoting, and high confinement in the deformed state. The hierarchical design of the device – that consists in vertical grooves stacked on an elastic sheet – enables a two-step sequential fluid capture. Each unit groove mimics the hummingbird’s tongue and closes due to capillary forces when a wetting liquid penetrates, yielding the closure of the whole device in a tubular shape, in the core of which additional liquid is captured. Combining elasticity, capillarity, and viscous flow, we rationalise the fluid-structure interaction at play both when liquid is scarce and abundant. By functionalising the surface of the grooves, such a passive device can concomitantly achieve all the steps of point-of-care tests, opening the way for the design of optimal devices for fluid capture and transport in microfluidics.