Numerical Simulation of a Sheathless Multi-CTC Separator Lab-on-a-Chip Using Inertial Focusing Method

Investigating and analyzing circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have shown to be an invaluable tool for early cancer detection and diagnosis. Microfluidic devices, which are inexpensive and simple to use, have recently gained a lot of attention for the enumeration and separation of CTCs. In this research, a novel sheathless double-loop spiral-based lab-on-a-chip is proposed dependent upon the functionality of inertial focusing for separating multiple CTCs such as MCF-7 (breast cancer CTCs) and A549 (lung cancer CTCs) distinctly from the normal cells like WBCs (white blood cells) and RBCs (red blood cells). The chip is designed and examined in numerical simulation using COMSOL Multiphysics 5.4 tool at various average flow velocities and Reynolds numbers (Re). In this study, the separation purities and recoveries of \(\sim \) $\sim$ 100% is gained by the chip at the Re values ranges from 71.75 \({\text{to}}\) $\text{to}$ 76.87 (flowrate of 87.8 \(-\) $-$ 94.1 ml/h), which indicates the high capability of separating multiple CTCs distinctly with high throughput.