5. Designing Meanders

When drawing physical designs of microfluidic devices, designers often have to handle re-occurring entities. Meander channels are one example, which are frequently used in different platforms but always have to fit the respective application and design rules. This chapter presents a method which is capable of automatically generating user-defined, two-dimensional designs of fluidic meander channels facilitating fluidic hydrodynamic resistances. This method is distributed as an online tool called Meander Designer and implements specific design rules as it considers the user’s needs and fabrication requirements. The compliance of the meanders generated by the Meander Designer is confirmed by fabricating devices using the generated designs and comparing whether the resulting devices indeed realize the desired specification. To this end, two case studies are considered: first, the realization of dedicated fluidic resistances and, second, the realization of dedicated mixing ratios of fluids. The results demonstrate the versatility of the method regarding application and technology. Overall, the freely accessible online tool with its flexibility and simplicity renders manual drawing of meanders obsolete and, hence, allows for a faster, more straightforward design process.