Flow modeling and experimental verification of flow resistors used in microfluidic chips driven by capillary force

Abstract

Abstract A microfluidic chip driven by capillary force has the advantage of low cost and ease of manufacturing in batches, and its flow behavior is dominated by the geometry and surface characteristics of the microchannel. The design of mirochannel structures is very important for the microfluidic chips. This study presents a semi analytical method for the design of capillary microchannel. In this method, the quasi-steady state approximate solution method of the Young–Laplace equation is used to derive the capillary surface tension, and the parallel flow assumption based on the Reynolds equation is used to derive the resistance of the channel wall. A computational fluid dynamics simulation is used to provide the inlet effect coefficient and channel shape effect coefficient of this model. The availability of the semi analytical model is verified by the experiment. This model realizes the flow analysis of two-dimensional capillary flow channel with a continuous shape of the flow channel wall, providing a fast and accurate method for the structural design of the microfluidic chip driven by capillary force.