Grimmer Andreas, Chen Xiaoming, Hamidović Medina, Haselmayr Werner, Ren Carolyn L, Wille Robert
Institute for Integrated Circuits, Johannes Kepler University Linz 4040 Linz Austria
Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo 200 University Ave W. Waterloo ON Canada.
RSC Adv. 2018 Oct 10;8(60):34733-34742. doi: 10.1039/c8ra05531a. eCollection 2018 Oct 4.
The functional performance of passively operated droplet microfluidics is sensitive with respect to the dimensions of the channel network, the fabrication precision as well as the applied pressure because the entire network is coupled together. Especially, the local and global hydrodynamic resistance changes caused by droplets make the task to develop a robust microfluidic design challenging as plenty of interdependencies which all affect the intended behavior have to be considered by the designer. After the design, its functionality is usually validated by fabricating a prototype and testing it with physical experiments. In case that the functionality is not implemented as desired, the designer has to go back, revise the design, and repeat the fabrication as well as experiments. This current design process based on multiple iterations of refining and testing the design produces high costs (financially as well as in terms of time). In this work, we show how a significant amount of those costs can be avoided when applying simulation before fabrication. To this end, we demonstrate how simulations on the 1D circuit analysis model can help in the design process by means of a case study. Therefore, we compare the design process with and without using simulation. As a case study, we use a microfluidic network which is capable of trapping and merging droplets with different content on demand. The case study demonstrates how simulation can help to validate the derived design by considering all local and global hydrodynamic resistance changes. Moreover, the simulations even allow further exploration of different designs which have not been considered before due to the high costs.
被动操作的微滴微流控的功能性能对通道网络的尺寸、制造精度以及施加的压力很敏感，因为整个网络是相互耦合的。特别是，液滴引起的局部和全局流体动力阻力变化使得开发一种稳健的微流控设计具有挑战性，因为设计者必须考虑大量相互影响预期行为的相互依存关系。设计完成后，其功能通常通过制造原型并进行物理实验来验证。如果功能没有按预期实现，设计者必须返回、修改设计，并重复制造和实验。这种基于对设计进行多次细化和测试迭代的当前设计过程会产生高昂的成本（包括财务成本和时间成本）。在这项工作中，我们展示了在制造前应用模拟时如何避免大量此类成本。为此，我们通过一个案例研究展示了一维电路分析模型上的模拟如何在设计过程中提供帮助。因此，我们比较了使用模拟和不使用模拟的设计过程。作为案例研究，我们使用了一个能够按需捕获和合并具有不同内容物的液滴的微流控网络。该案例研究展示了模拟如何通过考虑所有局部和全局流体动力阻力变化来帮助验证派生的设计。此外，由于成本高昂，模拟甚至允许进一步探索以前未考虑过的不同设计。
