Design and Heat Transfer Simulation of a Thermal Block for the Integration of a DNA Biosensor Based on PCR

In this work, we present the design of a thermal block and the heat transfer simulation for the integration of a DNA biosensor based on PCR. The thermal block contains the PCR tubes which needs to be heated and cooled in order to catalyze the Polymerase Chain Reaction for genetic amplification. The simulation is compared with thermographic images from an experiment performed with the integrated system. Even though there are minimal error in the temperatures of the simulation and the thermographic images, the design resulted adequate for the application.