Uncertainty Analysis for Improved Design of Microfluidic Devices

The main objective of this book is to present a modeling and simulation methodology for estimating the variation of functional parameters of microfluidic components as result of fabrication dispersion. The approach used for achieving this objective is to implement in the simulation process the variations of the geometrical parameters caused by the fabrication dispersion as random variables and to model the influence of these variations on the performance of the simulated device. An important step in this process is to build statistical models for the fabrication dispersion for technologies representative for microfluidic devices. The proposed method is demonstrated using three test structures: a rectangular microchannel, a passive micromixer and a digital microfluidic device. In each example there are underlined important characteristics of the proposed simulation method: the ability to predict variation ranges of functional parameters, the ability to improve the design in function of the fabrication process and the possibility of obtaining more precise results than the traditional deterministic methods.