Abstract
The study of separating different sizes of particles through a microchannel has been an interest in recent years and the primary attention of this study is to isolate the particles to the specific outlets. The present work highly focuses on the design and numerical analysis of a microchip and the microparticles capture using special structures like corrugated dragonfly wing structure and cilia walls. The special biomimetic structured corrugated wing is taken from the cross-sectional area of the dragonfly wing and cilia structure is obtained from the epithelium terminal bronchioles to the larynx from the human body. Parametric studies were conducted on different sizes of microchip scaled and tested up in the range between 2–6 mm and the thickness was assigned as 80 µm in both dragonfly wing structure and cilia walls. The microflow channel is a low Reynolds number regime and with the help of the special structures, the flow inside the microchannel is pinched and a sinusoidal waveform pattern is observed. The pinched flow with sinusoidal waveform carries the particles downstream and induces the particles trapped in desired outlets. Fluid particle interaction (FPI) with a time-dependent solver in COMSOL Multiphysics was used to carry out the numerical study. Two particle sizes of 5 µm and 20 µm were applied, the inlet velocity of 0.52 m/s with an inflow angle of 50° was used throughout the study and it suggested that: the microchannel length of 3 mm with corrugated dragonfly wing structure had the maximum particle capture rate of 20 µm at the mainstream outlet. 80% capture rate for the microchannel length of 3 mm with corrugated dragonfly wing structure and 98% capture rate for the microchannel length of 2 mm with cilia wall structure were observed. Numerical simulation results showed that the cilia walled microchip is superior to the corrugated wing structure as the mainstream outlet can conduct most of the 20 µm particles. At the same time, the secondary outlet can laterally capture most of the 5 µm particles. This biomimetic microchip design is expected to be implemented using the PDMS MEMS process in the future.
Highlights
Capturing and sorting of particles through microchips were the paramount interest of study in recent years
Helical flows are induced by topographically patterned microchannel surfaces which allow parallel streams into guiding particles and other research was done on the microfluidic vortex theory [5,6,7,8,9,10]
The overall objective of the present work is divided into two-folds: (1) to design and numerically analyze the particle capture percentages of microchips with corrugated dragonfly wing structures; (2) to investigate the particle capture percentages by replacing the dragonfly wing structures with cilia walls in the microchips
Summary
Capturing and sorting of particles through microchips were the paramount interest of study in recent years. As the vortex technology is vastly used for capturing and separation of the particles through microchips. Various techniques to capture the particles through the microchips are elaborated. Viscoelasticity-induced particle migration technique was applied to separate particles by using strong elasticity and low viscosity through simple straight microchannels [2]. A passive microfluidic device with a spiral configuration uses inertial forces and viscous drag force for the complete separation of particles. A micro vortex manipulator (MVM) is a passive, scalable system for the separation of particles in microfluidic conditions. Helical flows are induced by topographically patterned microchannel surfaces which allow parallel streams into guiding particles and other research was done on the microfluidic vortex theory [5,6,7,8,9,10]
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