Manifold design for uniform fluid distribution in parallel microchannels

In this paper, we use an electrical circuit analogy to design a microfluidic manifold achieving a uniform distribution of flow across multiple channels with minimal pressure gradient throughout the flow. We investigate the impact of manifold design to the mass flow distribution derived from the electrical circuit analogy and then analyzed the flow distribution in microchannels using computational fluid dynamics including thermal modelling. We compared the flow uniformity in the parallel channels with other manifold designs and found that step manifold design has improved the flow and temperature uniformity of the parallel channels.