Mixed-Methodology-Based System-Level Simulation of Biochemical Assays in Integrated Microfluidic Systems

Keywords:
microfluidic, lab-on-a-chip, system level simulation, modeling

Abstract:
While lab-on-a-chip (LoC) systems are increasingly used in the areas of genomics, proteomics and drug discovery, their efficient simulation and design at system-level continue to be a challenge. Experimental trial-and-error and multiphysics-based high fidelity computation methods can lead to unacceptably long design cycles. Analytical, reduced-order modeling and system-simulation efforts have been proposed to speed up chip design, but involve over-simplified models that do not accurately account for the multiphysics phenomena and geometry induced non-idealities. To address these issues, this paper presents a mixed-methodology simulation approach that uses analytical dispersion, mixing and reaction models coupled with compact models for fluid flow and electric field. This approach is not only capable of predicting transport effects in individual components, but also the interactions among them. The accuracy (relative error < 10%) and speedup (>1,000X) of the methodology is validated by experimental and numerical studies.

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Nanotech 2006 Conference Program Abstract