Viscous fluid flow in a microchannel with hydrodynamic traps

Abstract

Simulation of creeping flows in complex three-dimensional domains is crucial for microfluidics applications, creating multipurpose microfluidic devices, which are used, for example, to study multistage chemical reactions and as analytical devices in medicine.In this work we study the features of the incompressible viscous fluid flow in a flat microchannel with a nontrivial internal structure (the hydrodynamic traps of various configurations) under the constant pressure drop.The three-dimensional boundary element method, improved by utilization high-efficient fast multipole method and heterogeneous computational workstation, was used in numerical simulation.We studied the flow pattern around C-shaped hydrodynamic traps distributed in a flat microchannel and consisting of five cylindrical elements of the same size. Such geometry is widely used in microfluidic devices for fixing particles in the flow, for example, biological objects during tests in medicine. The influence of the distance between the rows of traps on the flow pattern and distribution of the longitudinal and transverse components of the flow velocity was considered.