Yechun Wang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for her project titled “BRIGE: Computational Studies of Droplet Motion in Digital Microfluidics.” The award for this two-year project is $174,985.

Digital microfluidics, in which individual droplets are driven to move using chemical, thermal, acoustical or electrical approaches, has significant applications in biochemical and biomedical research activities due to its high-speed nature and simple structure. In this project, a fully three-dimensional Spectral Boundary Integral Algorithm for interfacial dynamics in a steady electric field will be developed. Fundamental investigations of the droplet motion in digital microfluidics will be carried out using this computational approach.

If successful, the proposed computational work could provide fundamental understanding of droplet dynamics, predict the operation of the device and optimize device design which may lead to a new generation of reliable, affordable and operationally convenient microfluidic devices. The proposed numerical algorithm also could be applied to drug delivery, fuel cells, water filtration technologies and a variety of other fields.