PDE Modeling of a Microfluidic Thermal Process for Genetic Analysis Application

Figure 5

Geometrical representation of the PDE model. Taking advantage of the axial symmetry of the chip, the entire system is represented as a two-dimensional rectangular region. Similarly the heater is represented as a line instead of being a surface. This reduction of one dimension allows the model to be solved for the temperature in a three-dimensional space but at a small fraction of the time and computational resources required by a FEM simulation.