An integrated simulator for coupled domain problems in MEMS

An integrated circuit and microfluidic simulator is presented in this paper. It allows coupled simulation of flow, structure, thermal, and electrical domains. The overall architecture and various algorithms including the coupling of the circuit and microfluidic simulators are described. An application of the simulator is demonstrated for a controlled microliquid dosing system using detailed numerical models for the fluid field, a low-dimensional model for the flow sensor, and circuit elements for the electronic control. Unlike other simulators which employ mostly lumped models for the various components, we formulate here a methodology for distributed systems.