Numerical simulation of hydrodynamic-based microfluidic device for single cell trapping

Single cell analysis has become the interest of a wide range of biological and biomedical engineering research. It could provide precise information of the individual cells which leads to important knowledge regarding human´s diseases. Many attempts have been done to perform single cell analysis which require the isolation of individual cells before further manipulation could be carried out. Recently, microfluidic has been widely used for cell trapping and single cell analysis such as mechanical and electrical detection. Hydrodynamic trapping could be applied in the microfluidic device to trap a single cell thus providing platform for further cell characterization. This paper presents a finite element model for single cell trapping using hydrodynamic concept. The proposed microfluidic device consists of two parallel microchannels (main channel and trapping channel). Fluid´s flow rates are optimized by performing microchannel geometrical size manipulation to isolate a 5 μm yeast cell. The analysis was carried out using finite element ABAQUS-FEA software. The optimized Rh_Main/Rh_Trap ratio was 3.5 and above for successful trapping.