Toward microfluidic design automation: a new system simulation toolkit for the in silico evaluation of droplet-based lab-on-a-chip systems

Miniaturization of biological and chemical assays in lab-on-a-chip systems is a highly topical field of research. The pressure-driven droplet-based microfluidic platform is a promising way to realize these miniaturized systems by expanding the capability of assays with special features that are unreached by traditional workflows. Full custom centric design of droplet-based microfluidic lab-on-a-chip systems leads to a high system integration level and design complexity. In our work, we report on a software toolkit based on the Kirchhoff laws for modeling droplet traffic and processing for even complex microfluidic networks. Experimental validation of the simulation results was performed utilizing directional droplet transport switching in a circular channel element. This structure can be employed as a benchmark system for the experimental validation of the obtained simulation results. As a result of these experiments, our design and simulation toolkit meet the requirements for a versatile and low-risk development of custom lab-on-a-chip devices. Together with our conceptual model of microfluidic networks, most of the development problems arising with complex lab-on-a-chip applications can be solved. Due to the high computational speed, the algorithm allows an interactive in silico evaluation of even complex sample-processing workflows in droplet-based microfluidic devices prior any preparation of prototypes. Summarizing the developed toolkit may become the foundation for the future development of software tools for a microfluidic design automation. As a result of this new way of simulation-based application-driven development, the advantages of lab-on-a-chip will be accessible for more people through the easy, versatile and efficient transformation from complex laboratory workflows to compact and easy to use lab-on-a-chip applications.