Study of Microfluidic System for Mechanical Property Measurement of Fluid-cell Interface

The system for measuring the mechanical properties of active cell is studied through an integrated microfluidic system for cell separation, alignment and measurement of mechanical properties. A highly efficient lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) was employed to optimize the micro-fluidic system to investigate the interrelations between mechanical properties and various surrounding fluid ingredients which are difficult to observe using current experimental techniques. A combination model of the three dimensional LBM and the immersed boundary method (IBM) were used to simulate these systems. The LBM was used to determine incompressible fluid flow with a regular Eulerian grid. The IBM was used to solve the deformation of cells and matrix fluid interaction with a Lagrangian grid. Highly non-linear results such as cell-cell interactions, fluid-cell interactions, and optical force-cell interactions is studied.