Geometry-free prediction of inertial lift forces in microfluidic devices using deep learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning model that predicts inertial lift forces in microfluidic devices without needing explicit geometric parameters, enabling better generalization across diverse channel shapes.

Contribution

The authors develop a geometry-free neural network model that generalizes particle lift force predictions to unseen channel geometries, improving simulation efficiency.

Findings

Model performs comparably to existing models on trained geometries.

Model generalizes effectively to unseen channel shapes.

Predicts particle migration patterns consistent with literature.

Abstract

Inertial microfluidic devices (IMDs) offer low-cost, high-throughput alternative techniques for many traditional particle- (or cell-) manipulation tasks, but simulating them requires being able to predict particle migration, and thus particle lift forces, under a variety of possible channel geometries. Recent work has demonstrated that machine learning models can be used to drastically speed up these numerical simulations, but doing so required training individual models for every unique channel cross-section type (e.g., rectangular, triangular) -- shifting the burden from the simulation step to the training step. In this paper, we develop a novel approach for predicting particle lift forces that contains no explicit geometric parameters. We train a neural network model using a new parameter set and show that while it performs comparably to existing models on channel geometries in the training set, it is able to generalize to unseen channel geometries far more effectively. We show that the lift force model developed herein can be easily transferred to particle tracing simulation software, where it is capable of predicting particle migration patterns consistent with the literature across a variety of channel designs.