Investigation and optimization of microfluidic flow-through chambers for homogeneous reaction space

Abstract

Many microfluidic applications use flow-through chambers in order to store [1], measure [2] or react [3] chemicals. These chambers are usually used with paused flow, but the novel solutions enable continuous flow inside the chamber, which assures much better throughput. In [4] Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations were presented for a given channel-chamber structure, where the chambers have a volume of V=1.1 µl. Our paper presents a case-study with CFD in which the flow is examined in flow-through chambers with different geometries. The goal of our study is to find a simple channel-chamber geometry which has lower diversity of flow velocity in the chamber. In this study we compare our results with the original case presented in [4].