CFD-based, Lagrangian-Eulerian coupling approach for magnetophoretic particle capture

Abstract

We study magnetophoretic capture of magnetic particles in microfluidic devices and present a parametric characterization for the capture efficiency. We model particle transport and capture using a computational fluid dynamic, CFD-based, Lagrangian-Eulerian approach that takes into account the dominant particle forces and particle-fluid coupling. We introduced two dimensionless groups that characterize particle capture, one that scales the magnetic and hydrodynamic forces on the particle and another that scales the distance to the magnetic field source. We use the model to parameterize capture efficiency with respect to the dimensionless numbers for both one-way and two-way particle-fluid coupling. We demonstrate that for dilute suspensions, the simplified one-way coupling analysis marginally underpredicts the capture efficiency computed using the two-way fully coupled analysis.