An Abstract Simulator for Species Concentrations in Channel-Based Microfluidic Devices

The design of microfluidic devices, i.e., Lab-on-Chips (LoCs) or Micro Total Analysis Systems ( $\mu $ TASs), is a tedious and cumbersome process with many time-consuming and costly fabrication cycles. Many of these devices contain dissolved species (i.e., solutes) that are required to appear in the system at specific predefined concentrations. The use of simulations can aid the design process of microfluidic devices. However, methods from Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFDs), which are commonly used, are computationally costly and require a lot of time to finish. In this work, we present a simulator for species concentrations in channel-based microfluidic devices that operates on a higher level of abstraction and is multiple orders of magnitude faster than CFD simulation methods. The simulator has been implemented in C++ and is benchmarked against CFD simulations as well as against measured results from experiments on a fabricated device. The results are analyzed and the applicability of the simulator for the simulation of microfluidic devices is assessed.