Recent Advances of Lattice Boltzmann Method in Microfluidic numerical Simulation

Abstract

Abstract The technology of microfluidics is widely adopted in various fields such as biomedicine, microanalysis, and microelectronics. For example, pharmaceutical scientists often use microfluidics as a tool for drug delivery or cell separation. The LBM (Lattice Boltzmann method) is a commonly used numerical simulation in microfluidic researches. LBM is used extensively for simulations containing complicated boundary conditions and multiphase interfaces as it needs relatively low computing power compared to other numerical simulation methods in complex situations. The brilliant capability in parallelism also allows it to have a high multitasking performance, increasing overall efficiency. In this paper, we reviewed several typical applications of LBM in the following three fields: (1) particle regulation; (2) flow control; (3) drug delivery. We concluded defects in current studies and proposed potential improvements to be investigated in the future.