A Combined Circuit-Electromagnetic-Fluidic Computational Methodology for Force Prediction in Lab-on-Chip Environments

This paper focuses on a computational method for the simulation of the motion and manipulation of bio-particles using dielectrophoretic and micro-fluidic forces. The presented method uses surface integral equations for modeling both electromagnetic (EM) and fluidic domains. A coupled circuit-EM methodology is used to model electrical excitations. A steady Stokes flow is assumed for computing the fluidic traction forces. The resulting simulator accurately predicts the fields and forces on arbitrarily-shaped three dimensional particles representing bio-species. The presented methodology is amenable to acceleration with state of the art oct-tree-based fast matrix-vector schemes for rapid linear time iterative solution. This integrated computational approach leads to a pathway for rapid simulation of coupled circuit-EM-fluidic systems for Lab-on-chip (LoC) manipulation of biological species, which provides medical device designers the capability to augment control of bio-species, and explore new system designs