Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA.
Lab Chip. 2019 Oct 7;19(19):3277-3291. doi: 10.1039/c9lc00658c. Epub 2019 Sep 4.
Flow sculpting is a powerful method for passive flow control that uses a sequence of bluff-body structures to engineer the structure of inertially flowing microfluidic streams. A variety of cross-sectional flow shapes can be created through this method, offering a new platform for flow manipulation or material fabrication useful in bioengineering, manufacturing, and chemistry applications. However, the inverse problem in flow sculpting - designing a device that produces a target fluid flow shape - remains challenging due to the complex, diverse, and enormous design space. Solutions to the inverse problem have been constrained to single-material fluid streams that are shaped into top-bottom symmetric shapes due to the bluff-body structures available in current libraries (pillars) that span the height of the channel. In this work, we introduce multi-material design and symmetry-breaking flow deformations enabled by half-height pillars, presented within an extremely fast simulation method for flow sculpting yielding a 34-fold reduction in runtime. The framework is deployed freely as a cross-platform application called "FlowSculpt". We detail its implementation and usage, and discuss the addition of enhanced search operations, which enable users to more easily design flow shapes that replicate their input drawings. With FlowSculpt, the microfluidics community can now quickly design flow shaping microfluidic devices on modest hardware, and easily integrate these complex physics into their research toolkit.
流型塑造是一种强大的被动流动控制方法，它使用一系列的钝体结构来设计惯性流动微流的结构。通过这种方法可以创建各种横截面的流动形状，为生物工程、制造和化学应用中的流动控制或材料制造提供了新的平台。然而，由于复杂、多样化和巨大的设计空间，流型塑造中的逆问题——设计产生目标流体流动形状的装置——仍然具有挑战性。由于当前库中可用的钝体结构（柱子）跨越通道的高度，因此逆问题的解决方案仅限于被塑造成上下对称形状的单材料流体流。在这项工作中，我们引入了由半高柱子实现的多材料设计和对称破缺流变形，并在流型塑造的极快仿真方法中得到了实现，这使得运行时间减少了 34 倍。该框架作为一个名为“FlowSculpt”的跨平台应用程序免费提供。我们详细介绍了它的实现和用法，并讨论了增强搜索操作的添加，这使得用户可以更轻松地设计复制其输入绘图的流动形状。有了 FlowSculpt，微流控社区现在可以在适度的硬件上快速设计流型微流控设备，并将这些复杂的物理特性轻松集成到他们的研究工具包中。
