Simulation of droplet-based microfluidic lab-on-a-chip applications

Abstract

Miniaturization of biological and chemical assays in lab-on-a-chip systems is a highly topical field of research. Droplet-based microfluidic chips are types of these miniaturized systems. They expand the capability of assays with special features that are unreached by traditional workflows. In particular, small sample volumes, independent separated reaction units, high throughput, automation and parallelization of assays are prominent features of droplet-based microfluidic devices. Full custom centric design of droplet-based microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology implicates a high system integration level and design complexity. Therefore advanced development methodologies are needed, comparable with the methods in electronic design automation. Our design and simulation toolkit meets these requirements for an agile and low-risk development of custom lab-on-a-chip devices. The system simulation approach enables a fast and precise prediction of complex microfluidic networks. This fact is confirmed by reference and benchmark experiments. The results show that the simulation correctly reproduces the experimental measurements.