Online measurement of mass density and viscosity of pL fluid samples with suspended microchannel resonator

Physical characterization of viscous samples is crucial in chemical, pharma and petroleum industry. For example, in the refining industry of petroleum, water percentage is verified by measuring the density of a sample. In this article we present a suspended microchannel resonator (SMR) which uses 5 pL of a fluid sample and measures its density with a resolution of 0.01 kg/m3 and a sensitivity of 16 Hz/kg/m3. The resonator can also simultaneously measure viscosity of the solutions with an accuracy of 0.025 mPa s. The SMR is part of a system which contains packaging and tubing to deliver samples to the resonator. The system can easily handle multiple viscous fluids to measure their densities and viscosities. The SMR is transparent, facilitating visual inspection of the microchannel content.