A team of scientists from UCLA, Iowa State, and Princeton report that they have discovered a new technique of sculpting custom fluid flows by placing tiny pillars in microfluidic channels. By altering the speed of the fluid, and stacking pillars with different width, placements, and orientations, in the fluid's path, they demonstrated that it is possible to create an wide array of controlled flows. This, they say, could allow clinicians to separate white blood cells from other cells in a blood sample, increase mixing in industrial applications, and more quickly perform lab-on-a-chip-type operations, like DNA sequencing and chemical detection.
The researchers found that if you increase the speed of fluid flow in microfluidic channels and add pillars in specific locations in the path, you can create distinct and predictable flows.
The equations to determine the fluid flows were fairly straightforward, but the number of configurations needed to solve the problem required them to use a supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). By using several thousand processors concurrently, the researchers ran more than 1,000 different problems, each representing a combination of different speeds, thicknesses, heights, or offsets. They hope to eventually create a complete library of microscopic fluid flows.
