The Immersed Surfaces Technology for Reliable and Fast Setup of Microfluidics Simulation Problems

In many microfluidic applications, the complexity of the system is such that it requires tremendous efforts to setup the CFD problem, ranging from dimensioning of the computational domain, to grid setup. In setting up a grid, the user must complain to various constraints: adequate near-wall resolution, reduce the aspect ratio and the rate of grid stretching, and control of cell skewness (in the framework of BFC structured grids). These issues can cause a large amount of numerical diffusion errors, which in turn requires reducing convection scheme accuracy to 1t-order to avoid divergence of the solution. We present here a new technique based on immersed surfaces that alleviates most of the evoked problems with traditional grid generation, permitting reliable and fast setup of microfluidics problems.