Multiphase CFD for Droplet Based Microfluidics

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) will play an important role in multiphase microfluidics, an emerging class of devices which use water-in oil droplets as containers for biochemical reactions. As life sciences research grows increasingly dependent on high throughput assays, droplets can provide small volumes (nL-pL) and high throughputs (>1000 assays/second) needed for single cell biology, proteomics, genomics, and drug discovery. From a modeling standpoint, droplet-based fluidics can be considerably more complex than conventional microfluidics as it involves coupled interactions between two immiscible phases. Surface tension, Laplace pressure, shape deformation, and other phenomena acting in cohort with the standard flow equations results in models which are difficult to solve analytically, and may have nonintuitive results. This webinar will begin with an overview of multiphase CFD and how it can be used to simulate fundamental unit operations in droplet systems such as drop generation, splitting, merging, and mixing. It will then discuss modeling of advanced phenomena including our group's work in particle concentration in droplets using internal microvortices, trapping droplets using focused lasers, and sorting drops using interfacial tension gradients.
Amar Basu received the BSE and MSE degrees in electrical engineering in 2001 and 2003, an MS in biomedical engineering in 2005, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2008, all with honors from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. His dissertation, under Prof. Yogesh Gianchandani, was in the area of microscale fluidic actuation and programmable actuation of microdroplets. Amar has worked with Intel's Advanced Technology group, General Motors, Silicon Graphics, and served as an adjunct faculty at the University of Michigan. He is currently assistant professor at the electrical engineering and biomedical engineering departments at Wayne State University. His research, supported primarily by the NSF, focuses on microfluidic and microelectronic technologies for high throughput screening and distributed healthcare. Amar received the IEEE Professor of the Year in 2009 and the Whitaker Foundation fellowship in 2005. His work as a consultant with Mobius Microsystems and Picocal has resulted in several patents.