Abstract
Concentration gradient generators are common components of microfluidic devices when specified mixing ratios have to be acquired. However, depending on their complexity, the creation of a suitable design is an elaborate task. Although approaches exist that derive such a design, they suffer from low flexibility and usability, which is why most concentration gradient generators are still mainly designed manually thus far—a time-consuming and error-prone task. To tackle this problem, we propose a method for the automatic design of tree-shaped concentration gradient generators and introduce a publicly available online tool that automatically generates a suitable design by adjusting the hydrodynamic resistances within the network. Moreover, the proposed tool is not only able to generate designs complying with user-defined requirements, such as mixing ratios, flow rates, and channel widths but also works for any number of outlets. Simulations using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool as well as evaluations on fabricated designs confirm the quality of the results obtained by the proposed tool.
Highlights
M ICROFLUIDIC concentration gradient generators are important components for biological and chemical research [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] due to their ability to create spatially resolved concentration values allowing to screen a wide range of concentrations at the same time
As a consequence, designing gradient generators is mainly done by hand far—resulting in a very time-consuming task where most likely errors are introduced due to the manual approach. We address this problem by introducing a publicly available online tool which is capable of automatically designing the layout of concentration gradient generators that satisfy user-defined requirements
In order to properly dimension the design of the gradient generator so that the desired concentration values are realized, a proper physical model is needed that allows to describe the behavior of such a microfluidic device
Summary
M ICROFLUIDIC concentration gradient generators are important components for biological and chemical research [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] due to their ability to create spatially resolved concentration values allowing to screen a wide range of concentrations at the same time. We address this problem by introducing a publicly available online tool which is capable of automatically designing the layout of concentration gradient generators that satisfy user-defined requirements. To this end, we utilize the tree-shape structure as well as the physical model proposed by Oh et al [13] to properly balance hydrodynamic resistances of the corresponding channels in order to match the user-defined concentration values as well as flow. BACKGROUND & MOTIVATION In this work, we consider the (automatic) generation of microfluidic gradient generators To this end, we first briefly review the corresponding design task followed by a discussion of the related work. This shows that the state-of-the-art in the design of microfluidic devices generating different mixtures still leaves a substantial amount for improvement—motivating our work
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