Computational study of separation and capture of micro-particles in microfluidic devices

摘要

Separation and concentration of blood cells are vital steps in biological sample preparation for the design and operation of microfluidic biochips. There have been significant efforts toward developing approaches for effective separation and capture of blood cells in microfluidic devices recently. The present paper is aimed to evaluate separation and capture of micro-particles in passive microfluidic channels using numerical simulations. Two passive layouts of microfluidic channels are employed in this study: imbalance-bifurcation and filter-trench. Results reveal that (i) infusion of different micro-particle sizes results in reduction of separation efficiency; (ii) it requires high splitting ratio of bifurcation branch to main channel to achieve high separation rate; (iii) the layout of two consecutive filter-trench microfluidic channel increases the capture rate of micro-particles and achieves better concentration efficiency.