An Interface-Particle Interaction Approach for Evaluation of the Co-Encapsulation Efficiency of Cells in a Flow-Focusing Droplet Generator
File version
Version of Record (VoR)
Author(s)
Saidi, Mohammad Said
Ghadami, Sepehr
Kashaninejad, Navid
Griffith University Author(s)
Primary Supervisor
Other Supervisors
Editor(s)
Date
Size
File type(s)
Location
Abstract
Droplet-based microfluidics offers significant advantages, such as high throughput and scalability, making platforms based on this technology ideal candidates for point-of-care (POC) testing and clinical diagnosis. However, the efficiency of co-encapsulation in droplets is suboptimal, limiting the applicability of such platforms for the biosensing applications. The homogeneity of the bioanalytes in the droplets is an unsolved problem. While there is extensive literature on the experimental setups and active methods used to increase the efficiency of such platforms, passive techniques have received less attention, and their fundamentals have not been fully explored. Here, we develop a novel passive technique for investigating cell encapsulation using the finite element method (FEM). The level set method was used to track the interfaces of forming droplets. The effects of walls and the droplet interfaces on relatively large cells were calculated to track them more accurately during encapsulation. The static surface tension force was used to account for the effects of the interfaces on cells. The results revealed that the pairing efficiency is highly sensitive to the standard deviation (SD) of the distance between the cells in the entrance channel. The pairing efficiency prediction error of our model differed by less than 5% from previous experiments. The proposed model can be used to evaluate the performance of droplet-based microfluidic devices to ensure higher precision for co-encapsulation of cells.
Journal Title
Sensors
Conference Title
Book Title
Edition
Volume
20
Issue
13
Thesis Type
Degree Program
School
Publisher link
Patent number
Funder(s)
Grant identifier(s)
Rights Statement
Rights Statement
© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Item Access Status
Note
Access the data
Related item(s)
Subject
Analytical chemistry
Ecology
Fluid mechanics and thermal engineering
Science & Technology
Physical Sciences
Persistent link to this record
Citation
Yaghoobi, M; Saidi, MS; Ghadami, S; Kashaninejad, N, An Interface-Particle Interaction Approach for Evaluation of the Co-Encapsulation Efficiency of Cells in a Flow-Focusing Droplet Generator, Sensors, 2020, 20 (13), pp. 3774