Title:Design and Computational Modeling of Spiral Microfluidic Channel for Sorting and Separating the Biomolecules
VOLUME: 15 ISSUE: 3
Author(s):S. Praveenkumar*, P. Arjunan Sridhar, D. Lingaraja and Ram G. Dinesh
Affiliation:Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Saveetha Engineering College, Chennai, Tamilnadu, Research Fellow, RMIT University, Melbourne, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Saveetha Engineering College, Chennai, Tamilnadu, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Saveetha Engineering College, Chennai, Tamilnadu
Keywords:Spiral microchannel, dean flow, anti-clogging, centrifugal flow, tubular pinch effect, inertial effect.
Abstract:
Background: Microfluidic technologies are a very challenging area today in the field of
biomolecule analysis. This has become feasible with the today’s advanced technologies by designing
and fabricating the microfluidic channel.
Materials and Methods: Initially, microfluidic channels are used to separate large molecules,
where the molecular dimension of the fluidic filter is greater than the gap size. In this work, separation
of biomolecules (like RBC, WBC and platelets) that are smaller than the microfluidic filter
gap size is demonstrated.
Results and Discussion: Due to the curvilinear nature of the spiral, there exists two vortices called
dean vortices within the channel and this is influenced by dean flow, centrifugal flow and tubular
pinch effect. While flowing a small aliquot of blood in the channel, due to these three effects,
molecules attain equilibrium position at one point. The position of equilibrium will be different for
different sized biomolecules and this varies with different input velocities.
Conclusion: The obtained computational modeling results show how the equilibrium positions influence
the separation efficiency of biomolecules in passive based microfluidic filter. Compared
with the traditional random nanoporous materials such as gel or polymer monolith, spiral based
microfluidic channels can be made precisely to have a pre-determined loop count and Dean Flow
number (De).
