• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.263-270
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• 2014

A fluid transport technique is a key issue for the development of microfluidic systems. In this paper, a new concept for transporting a droplet without external power sources is proposed and verified numerically. The proposed device is a heterogeneous surface which has both hydrophilic and hydrophobic horizontal surfaces. The numerical simulation to demonstrate the new concept is conducted by an in-house solution code (PowerCFD) which employs an unstructured cell-centered method based on a conservative pressure-based finite-volume method with interface capturing method (CICSAM) in a volume of fluid (VOF) scheme for phase interface capturing. It is found that the proposed concept for droplet transport shows superior performance for droplet transport in microfluidic systems.