Meander Designer: Automatically Generating Meander Channel Designs

Abstract

Microfluidics continues to bring innovation to the life sciences. It stimulates progress by enabling new ways of research in biology, chemistry, and biotechnology. However, when designing a microfluidic device, designers have to conduct many tasks by hand—resulting in labor-intensive processes. In particular, when drawing the design of the device, designers have to handle re-occurring entities. Meander channels are one example, which are frequently used in different platforms but always have to fit the respective application and design rules. This work presents an online tool which is capable of automatically generating user-defined, two-dimensional designs of fluidic meander channels facilitating fluidic hydrodynamic resistances. The tool implements specific design rules as it considers the user’s needs and fabrication requirements. The compliance of the meanders generated by the proposed tool is confirmed by fabricating the generated designs and comparing whether the resulting devices indeed realize the desired specification. To this end, two case studies are considered: first, the realization of dedicated fluidic resistances and, second, the realization of dedicated mixing ratios of fluids. The results demonstrate the versatility of the tool regarding application and technology. Overall, the freely accessible tool with its flexibility and simplicity renders manual drawing of meanders obsolete and, hence, allows for a faster, more straightforward design process.