A novel microfluidic design for blood plasma separation

One of the most crucial materials used in detection and diagnosis field is blood. The effects of blood components on the diagnosis process are significant. To avoid the disturbance of the experiments, the first step of blood analysis is to separate plasma from blood. Two dominant factors influence on this procedure are blood plasma skimming and Zweifach-Fung effect. In order to evaluate the separation device, two major criteria including separation and purity efficiency are introduced. The main drawback of these two factors is that they have reverse effect on each other which means that correcting one of them have destructive effect on the other one. Therefore, a trade-off between them should have happened. In this study, a novel microfluidic separation device is designed based on momentum definition and acceleration-deceleration effect. The computational CFD package, Ansys Fluent is used to simulate and solve this study. The Lagrangian approach is utilized for particle trajectory and the effect of the forces acting on each blood cell is considered. The results are then analyzed and shown that by using momentum and acceleration-deceleration effects, the purity efficiency would be increased by 15% with the same separation efficiency as before which was 70% on the average flow rate of 100 μl/min, approximately and it is completely providing for future use of this kind of device.