Modular and Extendable 1D-Simulation for Microfluidic Devices

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source, modular 1D simulation tool for microfluidic devices that is versatile, extendable, and capable of efficiently modeling a wide range of applications with quality comparable to experimental results.

Contribution

It presents a novel, open-source, modular 1D simulation framework that can be easily extended for various microfluidic applications, filling a gap in existing tools.

Findings

Efficient simulation of diverse microfluidic applications.

Simulation results match or exceed experimental device performance.

Open-source availability promotes wider adoption and customization.

Abstract

Microfluidic devices have been the subject of considerable attention in recent years. The development of novel microfluidic devices, their evaluation, and their validation requires simulations. While common methods based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can be time-consuming, 1D simulation provides an appealing alternative that leads to efficient results with reasonable quality. Current 1D simulation tools cover specific microfluidic applications; however, these tools are still rare and not widely adopted. There is a need for a more versatile and adaptable tool that covers novel applications, like mixing and the addition of membranes, and allows easy extension, resulting in one comprehensive 1D simulation tool for microfluidic devices. In this work, we present an open-source, modular, and extendable 1D simulation approach for microfluidic devices, which is available as an open-source software package at https://github.com/cda-tum/mmft-modular-1D-simulator. To this end, we propose an implementation that consists of a base module (providing the core functionality) that can be extended with dedicated application-specific modules (providing dedicated support for common microfluidic applications such as mixing, droplets, membranes, etc.). Case studies show that this indeed allows to efficiently simulate a broad spectrum of microfluidic applications in a quality that matches previous results or even fabricated devices.