Particles in Microfluidics
Department : Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering
There has been significant interest in the scientific community in understanding how to manipulate a collection of particles using microfluidic technologies. The focus of our research is to simulate particles of various shapes in confined geometries in Stokes flow. Currently we are looking at simulating "surfboard" shaped particles, which has been suggested by experimental studies, in bifurcated channels which models the flow of platelets in blood vessels using the Boundary Element Method. This research is conducted in collaboration with Prof. Eric Darve of the Mechanical engineering department. We are also interested in developing numerical schemes to solve the integral form of the Stokes equation using Nystrom collocation which will be spectrally accurate and in developing fast direct solvers for the Boundary Element method.