A Finite-Volume Toolbox for Comprehensive Simulation Fluid Flow and Mass Transport Phenomena in Paper-Based Microfluidics

GERLERO, GABRIEL S.; BERLI, CLAUDIO L. A.; KLER, PABLO A.

Congreso; MECOM2022 - XXXVIII CONGRESO ARGENTINO DE MECÁNICA COMPUTACIONAL; 2022

This work introduces porousMicroTransport, a new numerical toolbox for simulating flow and reactive transport in porous media, aimed at the study and design of paper-based microfluidic devices. The software is able to solve problems that involve the simultaneous coupling of (1) saturated (single-phase) or unsaturated (multiphase) fluid flow;(2) advection–diffusion–dispersion transport in porous media encompassing any number of concurrently transported species; and (3) a set of chemical reactions involving such species. porousMicroTransport adopts a macroscopic, Darcy-based approach for modeling fluid flow, with unsaturated cases fully described with the help of unsaturated flow models. The built-in library of unsaturated flow models offers implementations of various known constitutive relations, including the LETd model, which has been proposed specifically for paper-based microfluidics.