Robustness Analysis for Droplet-Based Microfluidic Networks
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Microfluidic networks can be applied to
droplet-based Lab-on-a-Chip devices, where droplets are used to
confine samples which flow through closed microchannels along
different paths in order to execute (bio-)chemical experiments.
In order to allow this routing of droplets, the design of the
microfluidic network has to be precisely defined and afterwards
fabricated. However, neither the fabrication process nor the
applied materials and components are perfect and, therefore,
the fabricated microfluidic device frequently contains defects
(produced by fabrication tolerances, properties of the used
material, or fluctuation of supply pumps). Those may have a
severe impact on the behavior of the microfluidic network and
can even render the network useless. Furthermore, these defects
complicate the design process, which eventually results in a
"trial-and-error"-approach causing high costs with respect to
time and money. Consequently, designers want to anticipate
how robust their design is against those defects. This work, for
the first time, describes how these defects can be abstracted,
which eventually allows to evaluate the robustness already in the
design process. We additionally introduce models considering
single and multiple defects as well as corresponding methods
for their analysis. Evaluations on a microfluidic network which
is used to screen drug compounds confirm that the resulting
robustness analysis indeed provides designers with a simple
metric to decide how sensitive their design is against defects.
The models and methods proposed in this paper are grounded
on the established one-dimensional analysis model.
Sprache der Kurzfassung:
Englisch
Journal:
IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
Forschungs-