Design Tools for Bio-Micromachined Device Design

Using micromachining for biological applications requires complicated structures such as mixers, separators, preconcentrators, filters, and pumps, and these elements are used to process biomolecules or biological cells. To accelerate the design of these complicated devices, new tools are needed that can efficiently simulate mixing and particle or cell motion in complicated three-dimensional flows. In addition, for microfluidic devices intended for use in molecular separation, the length scales are such that noncontinuum fluid effects must be considered, and therefore hybrid approaches that combine molecular and continuum models must be developed. Finally, the wide variety of structures being developed implies that generating models for system-level simulation will require efficient simulation combined with automated model extraction. The recent work in addressing these problems includes the development of efficient time integration techniques for cells in flow, techniques for accurately extracting diffusion constants from measurements, and efficient techniques for extracting models from detailed simulations.