The complexity of droplet microfluidics grows with the implementation of parallel processes and multiple functionalities on a single device. This poses a serious challenge to the engineer designing the corresponding microfluidic networks. In today's design processes, the engineer relies on calculations, assumptions, simplifications, as well as his/her experiences and intuitions. In order to validate the obtained specification of the microfluidic network, usually a prototype is fabricated and physical experiments are conducted thus far. In case the design does not implement the desired functionality, this prototyping iteration is repeated -obviously resulting in an expensive and time-consuming design process. In order to avoid unnecessary debugging loops involving fabrication and testing, simulation methods could help to initially validate the specification of the microfluidic network before any prototype is fabricated. However, state-of-the-art simulation tools come with severe limitations, which prevent their utilization for practically-relevant applications. More precisely, they are often not dedicated to droplet microfluidics, cannot handle the required physical phenomena, are not publicly available, and can hardly be extended. In this work, we present an advanced simulation approach for droplet microfluidics which addresses these shortcomings and, eventually, allows to simulate practically-relevant applications. To this end, we propose a simulation framework which directly works on the specification of the design, supports essential physical phenomena, is publicly available, and easy to extend. Evaluations and case studies demonstrate the benefits of the proposed simulator: While current state-of-the-art tools were not applicable for practically-relevant microfluidic networks, the proposed solution allows to reduce the design time and costs e.g. of a drug screening device from one person month and USD 1200, respectively, to just a fraction of that.
We present a simple, stable, and
highly reproducible off-chip-controlled
method for generating droplets-on-demand. To induce the droplet generation,
externally pre-programmed positive pressure pulses are applied to
the dispersed phase input while the continuous phase channel remains
at constant input pressure. By controlling solely one fluid phase,
the method allows for connecting multiple independent dispersed-phase
channels to a single continuous channel. Experimental results show
that the method allows for a droplet generation frequency of 33 Hz
and a high reproducibility of droplets with standard deviations less
than 5% of the mean value. Moreover, utilization of the off-chip-controlled
method results in the simplicity in chip design and allows rapid (∼5
min) and cost-efficient (0.5 USD) prototyping of the device.
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