Shear Stress Analysis in High-Throughput Dual-micropillar-based Microfluidic Platform

J.Borana[1], J.M.Lee[2], B.G.Chung[2]
[1]Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, India
[2]Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul, Korea
Published in 2013

We developed the dual-micropillar-based microfluidic platform to control cellular behavior. The 4×4 dual micro-pillar based platform consists of 16 circular-shaped outer micropillars and 8 saddle shaped inner-micropillars. We simulated various shapes of inner micropillars to analyze the shear stress inside the inner micropillar. Therefore, this dual-micropillar-based microfluidic platform could be useful to understand cell biology and single cell analysis.

We simulated shear stress profile using COMSOL Multiphysics®. We simulated profiles for different depth of inner saddle-shaped micropillars and different shapes of inner micropillars. We used CFD module to calculate shear stress at different average inlet flow rate. This analysis was important to develop a microfluidic platform to direct embryonic stem (ES) cell fate.