Computational fluid dynamics-based design of a microfabricated cell capture device.

A microfluidic cell capture device was designed, fabricated, evaluated by numerical simulations and validated experimentally. The cell capture device was designed with a minimal footprint compartment comprising internal micropillars with the goal to obtain a compact, integrated bioanalytical system. The design of the device was accomplished by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Various microdevice designs were rapidly prototyped in poly-dimethylsiloxane using conventional soft lithograpy technique applying micropatterned SU-8 epoxy based negative photoresist as moulding replica. The numerically modeled flow characteristics of the cell capture device were experimentally validated by tracing and microscopic recording the flow trajectories using yeast cells. Finally, we give some perspectives on how CFD modeling can be used in the early stage of microfluidics-based cell capture device development.