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Design Optimization of Liquid-Phase Flow Patterns for Microfabricated Lung on a Chip

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Abstract

Microreactors experience significant deviations from plug flow due to the no-slip boundary condition at the walls of the chamber. The development of stagnation zones leads to widening of the residence time distribution at the outlet of the reactor. A hybrid design optimization process that combines modeling and experiments has been utilized to minimize the width of the residence time distribution in a microreactor. The process was used to optimize the design of a microfluidic system for an in vitro model of the lung alveolus. Circular chambers to accommodate commercial membrane supported cell constructs are a particularly challenging geometry in which to achieve a uniform residence time distribution. Iterative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed to optimize the microfluidic structures for two different types of chambers. The residence time distributions of the optimized chambers were significantly narrower than those of non-optimized chambers, indicating that the final chambers better approximate plug flow. Qualitative and quantitative visualization experiments with dye indicators demonstrated that the CFD results accurately predicted the residence time distributions within the bioreactors. The results demonstrate that such a hybrid optimization process can be used to design microreactors that approximate plug flow for in vitro tissue engineered systems. This technique has broad application for optimization of microfluidic body-on-a-chip systems for drug and toxin studies.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grant W81XWH-10-1-0542 from the U. S. Army. The authors thank Richard Zotti at the CREOL Machine Shop at the University of Central Florida (UCF) for his assistance in production of the flow housings. This work was performed in part at the Cornell NanoScale Facility, a member of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant ECS-0335765). Craig Finch thanks the Institute for Simulation and Training (IST) at UCF for donating computing time on the Stokes cluster, and IST and the NanoScience Technology Center at UCF for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NanoScience Technology Center, University of Central Florida, 12424 Research Parkway Suite 401, Orlando, FL, 32828, USA

    C. Long, C. Finch, W. Anderson & J. Hickman

  2. Institute for Simulation and Training, University of Central Florida, 3100 Technology Pkwy, Orlando, FL, 32826, USA

    C. Finch

  3. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University, 115 Weill Hall, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    M. Esch & M. Shuler

Authors
  1. C. Long
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  2. C. Finch
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  3. M. Esch
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  4. W. Anderson
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  5. M. Shuler
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  6. J. Hickman
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to M. Shuler or J. Hickman.

Additional information

Associate Editor Jong Hwan Sung oversaw the review of this article.

C. Long and C. Finch contributed equally to this work.

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Long, C., Finch, C., Esch, M. et al. Design Optimization of Liquid-Phase Flow Patterns for Microfabricated Lung on a Chip. Ann Biomed Eng 40, 1255–1267 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-012-0513-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-012-0513-8

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