A reduced-order model for whole-chip thermal analysis of microfluidic lab-on-a-chip systems

This paper presents a Krylov subspace projection-based reduced-order model (ROM) for whole microfluidic chip thermal analysis, including conjugate heat transfer. Two key steps in the reduced-order modeling procedure are described in detail: (1) the acquisition of a 3D full-scale computational model in the state-space form to capture the dynamic thermal behavior of the entire microfluidic chip; and (2) the model order reduction using the block Arnoldi algorithm to markedly lower the dimension of the full-scale model. Case studies using practically relevant thermal microfluidic chip are undertaken to establish the capability and to evaluate the computational performance of the reduced-order modeling technique. The ROM is compared against the full-scale model and exhibits good agreement in spatiotemporal thermal profiles (< 0.5 % relative error in pertinent time scales) and over three-orders-of-magnitude acceleration in computational speed. The salient model reusability and real-time simulation capability render it amenable for operational optimization and in-line thermal control and management of microfluidic systems and devices.