A tracking algorithm for finite-size particles

Abstract: Particle-wall interactions play a crucially important role in various applications such as microfluidic devices for cell sorting, particle separation, entire class of hydrodynamic filtration and its derivatives, etc. Yet, accurate implementation of interactions between wall and finite-size particle is not trivial when working with the currently available particle tracking algorithms/packages as they typically work with point-wise particles. Herein, we report a particle tracking algorithm that takes into account interactions between particles of finite size and solid objects existing inside computational domain. A particle is modeled as a set of circumferential points on its perimeter. While fluid-particle interactions are captured during the track of particle center, interactions between particle and nearby solid objects are modeled explicitly by examining circumferential points and applying a reflection scheme as needed to ensure impenetrability of solid objects. We also report a modified variant of auxiliary structured grid method to locate hosting cells, which in conjunction with a boundary condition scheme enables the capture of interactions between particle and solid objects. As a proof-of-concept, we numerically and experimentally study the motion of particles within a microfluidic deterministic lateral displacement device. The modeling results successfully demonstrate the zig-zag and bumping displacement modes observed in our experiments. We also study a microfluidic device with pinched flow numerically and validate our results against experimental data from the literature. By demonstrating an almost 8x speedup on a system with 8 Performance threads, our investigations suggest that the particle tracking algorithm and its implementation code can benefit from parallel processing on multi-thread systems by using the OpenMP application programming interface.