Numerical and experimental characterization of a piezoelectric actuator for microfluidic cell sorting

Piezoelectric actuators offer great opportunities for precise and low-cost control of fluids at the microscale. Microfluidic systems with integrated piezoelectric actuators find application as droplet generators, micropumps, and microsorters. To accelerate device design and optimization, modeling and simulation approaches represent an attractive tool, but there are challenges arising from the multiphysics nature of the problem. Simple, potentially real-time approaches to experimentally characterize the fluid response to piezoelectric actuation are also highly desirable. In this work, we propose a strategy for the numerical and experimental characterization of a piezoelectric microfluidic cell sorter. Specifically, we present a 3D coupled multiphysics finite-element model of the system and an easy image-based approach for flow monitoring. Sinusoidal and pulse actuation are considered as case studies to test the proposed methodology. The results demonstrate the validity of the approach as well as the suitability of the system for cell sorting applications.