Inertial Focusing and Lateral Manipulation of Particles in a Microchannel Flow

Abstract

In this paper, we have developed a numerical model based on the immersed-boundary Lattice Boltzmann Method (IB-LBM) for manipulating a neutrally buoyant microparticle immersed in a fluid inside a microchannel. The fluid flow in the channel lies in the inertial regime (i.e., the effect of inertia cannot be ignored). The current work investigates the focusing of neutrally buoyant microparticles in plane Couette, and Poiseuille flows in a microchannel. The accuracy of the proposed method is first established by benchmarking the results with multiple analytical, numerical, and experimental works. A good agreement between the numerical and previously published numerical and experimental results is obtained in all the cases. The accuracy of the simulations reveals that LBM is a powerful method that can be used further to advance the relatively nascent field of inertial microfluidics.