Journal: PLoS ONE

Article Title: Instantaneous simulation of fluids and particles in complex microfluidic devices

doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189429

Figure Lengend Snippet: In the COMSOL Multiphysics simulation (A), the fluid velocity field is calculated using finite element analysis (Step 1) and the Particle Tracing for Fluid Flow physics module is used to calculate the paths followed by particles (Step 2). In our instantaneous simulation (B), the flow rates in the channels were calculated using Eqs – and fluidic analogs of Kirchhoff’s circuit laws, then simulation results for the channel intersections (dashed red boxes) were found by searching for similar intersections in our database of nearly 100,000 pre-simulated intersections (Step 1). The software retrieved the corresponding particle trajectories from these intersection simulations (blue points in Step 2) and expanded them into whole-chip particle trajectories (yellow points in Step 2). Our instantaneous simulation method was 45 times faster than COMSOL Multiphysics, and the predicted locations of each particle at the exit channels agree to within about 1 μ m in a 200 μ m wide channel. Raw data of these simulations are available for download .

Article Snippet: For the simple chip in , the fluid velocity field of the chip was solved using the Laminar Flow physics module in COMSOL Multiphysics and a stationary solver.

Techniques: Software