Study on Micro-Channels Design for Centrifugal Force Driven Micro-Fluid System

Abstract

Centrifugal force has been found to be an excellent method to control fluidic flow in biochips. Most micro-fluidics researchers already use the computer to simulate micro-fluidics flow behavior to save time and reduce mistakes. In this study, the overflow design accurately fixes the liquid volume with less than 5% error. Centrifugal force driven micro-fluidics system is designed with both simulation and experiment. The 3D simulations to utilize computational fluid dynamic software (CFD) to simulate the fluid flow and calculate burst frequency at different capillary switching and several dimension of micro-channels (300, 400, 500μm wide and each 200μm deep). For mercurochrome, the simulation results (384, 360, 348 rpm) shows burst frequency matches experimental results (468, 426, 402rpm) and accurately predicts measured trends followed the effect of channel width. This study also demonstrates the centrifugal application of an advanced computational fluidic dynamics model for the design and analysis of a centrifugal force driven micro-fluidics system.