Experimental Investigation of Drag and Lift Forces on Microparticles in Low Reynolds Number Poiseuille Flow in Microchannel

In this paper, the hydrodynamic drag and lift forces on microparticles in a dilute suspension in low Reynolds number Poiseuille flow in a microchannel is experimentally investigated using microscopic image analysis. An effective technique is applied to manipulate single-particle tracking in order to determine the velocity field and hydrodynamic forces on microparticles with diameter-to-channel height ratio of 0.1 in microchannels. The results show that there is a distance near the walls of the channel in which the hydrodynamic coupling between the particles and channel walls is considerable. Also, the magnitude of drag force that is imposed on the particles with particle-wall separations of 10% of particle diameter is 36 times more than the Stokes drag force condition.