Abstract. Enantiomers are chiral objects such as chemical molecules that can be distinguished by their handedness. They typically occur as racemic compounds of left-and right-handed species which may have completely different properties. Therefore, in applications such as drug design in pharmacology, enantiomer separation is an important issue. Here, we present a new technology for enantiomer separation by surface acoustic wave generated vorticity patterns consisting of pairwise counter-rotating vortices in a carrier fluid. The enantiomers are injected onto the surface of the fluid between two counter-rotating vortices such that right-handed (left-handed) enantiomers get attracted by left-rotating (right-rotating) vortices. In particular, we are concerned with the numerical simulation of this separation process by an application of the finite element immersed boundary method which relies on the solution of a coupled system consisting of the incompressible NavierStokes equations and the equations of motion of the immersed enantiomers described with respect to an Eulerian and a Lagrangian coordinate system. For a model system of deformable, initially L-shaped enantiomers the results of the numerical simulations reveal a perfect separation.
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