porousMicroTransport: A versatile finite-volume toolbox for numerical prototyp- ing of paper-based microfluidic devices

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

Congreso; III Brazil-Argentine Microfluidics - Congress VI Congreso de Microfluídica Argentina; 2022

porousMicroTransport is a set of tools for numerical simulation aimed at the study and design ofpaper-based microfluidic devices. The software toolbox is novel in its orientation towards flowin paper-like porous media and its ability to deal with several phenomena of interest at once.Such phenomena include solvent flow in both saturated and unsaturated regimes, motion ofany number of diluted species via the effects of advection, molecular diffusion and mechanicaldispersion, as well as chemical reactions between the species. Notably, the implementationsof unsaturated flow in porousMicroTransport can invoke equations and constitutive modelsthat target capillary flow in paper media in particular, which offer both versatility and compu-tational efficiency. porousMicroTransport is available as open source software, built on topof the OpenFOAM® finite-volume multiphysics simulation platform. Other noteworthy featuresinclude automatic timestep management in simulations and the use of an automated test suitefor validation. We introduce the toolbox to the microfluidics community, and show its potentialapplication in the prototyping of paper-based microfluidic devices through the numerical recreationof an experimental example from the literature.