Microfluidic particle sorting has applications in diagnostics, chemical and biological analyses, food and chemical processing as well as environmental assessment. The main advantage of using microfluidic sorting platforms is the requirement of smaller sample volumes which, in turn, results in reduced costs and time. In diagnostics it reduces invasiveness for patients. Moreover, such miniature platforms can be massively parallelized, which makes higher number of particle sorting possible in less time. Sorting can be done using a passive or an active technique. A passive technique does not require external fields and is solely based on the interaction between particles, flow field and the channel structure. An active technique, on the other hand, uses external fields such as magnetic or electrical. The animation below shows particle sorting of three particle species using a passive sorting technique based on the hydrodynamics of the microfluidic platform.

Read the full blog to learn more about the use of FLOW-3D in performing sorting technique simulations and the physics behind them.