Interface capturing in dual-flow microfluidics

Dual-fluid flows are utilised extensively in microfluidics applications. A problem of particular interest is the precise positioning of the contact discontinuity between the carrier fluids. The paper presents a computational study of the interface positioning in xylene/water flows used in polymer membrane fabrication in microfluidics. Both artificial compressibility, high-resolution characteristics-based and pressure-correction-based schemes have been employed. The former numerically captures the interface position, whereas the latter is used in conjunction with a volume-of-fluid interface tracking scheme. The high-resolution scheme results in less diffusive grid-aligned contact discontinuity and the predicted interface position compares favourably with analytic results.