CFD for Microfluidics: A Workflow for Setting Up the Simulation of Microfluidic Devices

Microfluidics is an emerging technology that is expected to revolutionize biochemical experiments and reduce the need for unwieldy laboratory equipment. Motivated by that, the design automation community has spent considerable efforts and proposed numerous methods on automating the design process for corresponding microfluidic devices. For many of them, however, it often remains unclear whether the (automatically) generated design indeed works as intended and/or satisfies its purpose. Simulations, e.g., based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) can help here as they allow for studying the behavior of microfluidic devices without the need for actual fabrication. However, the setup and configuration of CFD simulations is time- consuming and requires extensive expertise—some of the reasons why it is hardly utilized in the design automation community yet. In this work, we propose a workflow that improves upon this state of the art by automating intermediate steps and highlighting the parameters that are relevant to the specific use case. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed workflow for fluid mixing in channel-based microfluidics.