CFD simulation of micro-particle trapping under water tweezers

Abstract

In early research, capture and manipulation of particles were mainly achieved by means of light, electricity and plasma in micro-fabrication and micro-assembly. A new method is proposed using micro-water jet to form water tweezers to capture solid particles and implement position control of micro-particles. This paper analyzes the basic principle of water tweezers, and the discrete element method and smoothed particle hydrodynamics method are employed to establish a solid-liquid coupling model used in analyzing the trapping mechanism. A flow field model is set up to simulate dynamic characteristic of water tweezers based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Selection of boundary conditions, initial guess, solver control and convergence strategies of the model are discussed. Velocity and pressure of streamline are predicted and discussed under certain input conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that it is an efficiently theoretical method to eventually trap solid particles by water tweezers.

Keywords

Water tweezers / Micro-particle trapping / Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) / Boundary condition

References

[1] Karl F, Ronald S, Fearing KY. Micro-assembly, handbook of industrial robotics, 2007, Berkeley: Wiley

[2] Fukuda T, Dong L. Assembly of nanodevices with carbon nanotubes through nanorobotic manipulations. Proc IEEE, 2003, 91: 1803-1818.

[3] Huang L, Maerkl S, Martin O. Integration of plasmonic trapping in a microfluidic environment. J Opt Express, 2009, 17: 6018-6024.

[4] Malekzadeh M, Halali M. Production of silver nanoparticles by electromagnetic levitation gas condensation. Chem Eng J, 2011, 168: 441-445.

[5] Brown K, Westervelt R (2009) Proposed triaxial atomic force microscope contact-free tweezers for nanoassembly. Nanotechnology

[6] Shaikh FA, Ugaz VM. Collection, focusing, and metering of DNA in microchannels using addressable electrode arrays for portable low-power bioanalysis. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 2006, 103: 4825-4830.

[7] Chen Z, Wu Z, Tong L, Pan H, Liu Z. Simultaneous dielectrophoretic separation and assembly of single-walled carbon nanotubes on multigap nanoelectrodes and their thermal sensing properties. Anal Chem, 2006, 78: 8069-8075.

[8] Washizu M, Kurosawa O. Electrostatic manipulation of DNA in microfabricated structures. IEEE T Ind Appl, 1990, 1990(26): 1165-1172.

[9] Ashkin A, Dziedzic J, Bjorkholm J, Chu S. Observation of a single-beam gradient force optical trap for dielectric particles. Opt Lett, 1986, 11: 288-290.

[10] Cheng X, Xu Y, Zhou L. Water tweezers for particles gagging. Int Conf Comput Appl Syst Model, 2010, 8: 22-24.

[11] Feng Y, Jianming W, Feihong L. Numerical simulation of single particle acceleration process by SPH coupled FEM for abrasive waterjet cutting. Int J Adv Manuf Technol, 2012, 59: 193-200.

[12] Liu MB, Liu GR. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH): an overview and recent developments. Arch Comput Methods Eng, 2010, 17: 25-76.

[13] De Vuyst T, Vignjevic R, Campbell JC. Coupling between meshless and finite element methods. Int J Impact Eng, 2005, 31: 1054-1064.