Advanced Simulation of Droplet Microfluidics

TL;DR

This paper introduces an advanced, publicly available simulation framework for droplet microfluidics that supports complex physical phenomena, enabling more efficient and cost-effective design validation before prototyping.

Contribution

The work presents a novel simulation approach tailored for droplet microfluidics, overcoming limitations of existing tools by supporting relevant physical phenomena and being easily extendable.

Findings

Enables simulation of practically-relevant microfluidic networks.

Reduces design time and costs significantly.

Supports essential physical phenomena in droplet microfluidics.

Abstract

The complexity of droplet microfluidics grows by implementing parallel processes and multiple functionalities on a single device. This poses a challenge to the engineer designing the microfluidic networks. In today's design processes, the engineer relies on calculations, assumptions, simplifications, as well as his/her experiences and intuitions. In order to validate the obtained specification of the microfluidic network, usually a prototype is fabricated and physical experiments are conducted thus far. In case the design does not implement the desired functionality, this prototyping iteration is repeated - obviously resulting in an expensive and time-consuming design process. In order to avoid unnecessary prototyping loops, simulation methods could help to validate the specification of the microfluidic network before any prototype is fabricated. However, state-of-the-art simulation tools come with severe limitations, which prevent their utilization for practically-relevant applications. More precisely, they are often not dedicated to droplet microfluidics, cannot handle the required physical phenomena, are not publicly available, and can hardly be extended. In this work, we present an advanced simulation approach for droplet microfluidics which addresses these shortcomings and, eventually, allows to simulate practically-relevant applications. To this end, we propose a simulation framework which directly works on the specification of the design, supports essential physical phenomena, is publicly available, and easy to extend. Evaluations and case studies demonstrate the benefits of the proposed simulator: While current state-of-the-art tools were not applicable for practically-relevant microfluidic networks, the proposed solution allows to reduce the design time and costs e.g. of a drug screening device from one person month and USD 1200, respectively, to just a fraction of that.