Abstract. Manipulating micro-particles is very important in microfluidic applications, such as biomedical flows and self-assembled structures. Here, flows generated by the forced motion of colloidal micro-particles in a microchannel are investigated. The force coupling method combined with the spectral/hp element method is used to numerically simulate the dynamics of the flow, while a penalty method is used to determine the required forces on the particles. The pumping motion is investigated for two specific systems: a peristaltic micro-pump and a gear micro-pump. We verify the accuracy of the simulations and then for each system, we investigate the net flow rate as a function of pump frequency and channel dimension, and present optimization results. The results for the net flow rate are comparable to and within the range of the experimental data.

Print publication: Issue 4 (April 2004)
Received 3 November 2003
Published 19 January 2004