Multi-Physics Modeling and Measurements for Microwave Microfluidic Devices and Cellular Interactions

As the field of microwave biosensing evolves and matures, the need for more detailed modeling of the interactions between microwave EM fields and biological samples (aqueous solutions, cell suspensions, tissues) becomes more important to enable correlation between the observed spectral features and the underlying biophysical properties. The main problem both for measurements and modeling is the fact that the electromagnetic description needs to be expanded to include thermal effects, effects of flow, cell morphology and deformation, etc. In this talk we will discuss recent efforts at the KU Leuven to use commercial solvers for designing microwave microheaters for microfluidics, as well as the experimental setups that were built to characterize these devices. In addition, we will discuss the development of dedicated full-wave 3D integral equation solvers to efficiently compute EM fields in randomly shaped membrane bound biological systems such as eukaryotic cells, bacteria, lipid vesicles such as exosomes, etc.