A High Fidelity Simulation Environment for Thermo-Fluid-Mechanical Design of MEMS

The MEMS technology is a fast growing, emerging discipline with significant commercial potential. Typically, the analysis techniques for modeling the transport and fluid flow phenomena associated with MEMS devices utilize very basic fluid dynamics principles or rely on the semi-empirical correlations. Higher fidelity analysis techniques, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), for microfluid design are still unexplored. Furthermore, their incorporation of such techniques and the combination with other analysis tools in the MEMS design environment is completely unexplored. The focus of the proposed effort is to demonstrate that high fidelity CFD-based techniques are applicable to MEMS and that they can be cost effectively incorporated into the design process to obtain better designs with shorter design cycle. During Phase I, existing software tools, CFD-GEOM, CFD-ACE, and CFD-VIEW will be adapted for fluid-thermal-structural simulations in microfluidic devices. The basic flow and heat transfer solver will be validated on available experimental data from microchannel flow experiments. All tools will be verified for selected passive and active practical microfluid devices. A prototype design environment MEMS-FLOW will be designed and demonstrated. It will be further enhanced and demonstrated in Phase II. Anticipated Benefits: The developed MEMS-FLOW simulation environment will be applicable to all types of microfluid MEMS devices. It will be useful for microelectronics, automotive, chemical, biomedical and industrial engineering. It will also allow rapid prototyping of microdevices and their systems.