My research topic is Modeling and Simulation of Flow and Reactions in Microfluidic System.  Since microfluidic microarray systems for oligonucleotide and peptide parallel synthesis have been developed in our research group and the preliminary experimental results suggested that the flow pattern and uniformity have a great impact on the synthesis yield.  Thus, one of the essential factors to success of on-chip oligonucleotide parallel synthesis reaction is the flow uniformity of reagents through thousands of parallel microreactors.  To improve the flow uniformity, the flow pattern affected by the designed geometry of the microsystem has been studied. However, generally, the primary obstacle in any development procedure of MEMS and microfluidic devices is the insufficient understanding of physical phenomena and their interactions in the microscale which are often complex and involved with three-dimensional flow behaviors.  During the past few years, an experimental trial and error procedure has been used in the design, fabrication, and testing of a microsystem, resulting in the expensive, labor-intensive and time-consuming development procedure.  Not until recently, the advanced computer aided design (CAD) tools including computational fluid dynamics (CFD) have gained importance and been widely used in the design and optimization of these complex microfluidic devices.  In our study, a commercial CFD software package (CFD-ACE+ from CFD Research Corp.) is used to model and simulate the microfluidic system and reactions in order to find a systematic way to design biochip with uniform reagent flows though thousands of microreactors or porous media designed to optimize the biochemical reactions taking place at the liquid solid interface in the microarrays.

A figure shows a highly non-uniform flow distribution in microfluidic system.

A figure shows a better flow distribution in an improved microfluidic geometry.