Numerical and experimental analysis of a high-throughput blood plasma separator for point-of-care applications

Blood plasma separation from undiluted blood is an essential step in many diagnostic procedures. This study focuses on the numerical optimization of the microfluidic blood plasma separator (BPS) and experimental validation of the results to achieve portable blood plasma separation with high purity and reasonable yield. The proposed design has two parts: a microchannel for blood processing and a tank below the aforementioned main channel for plasma collection. The study uses 3D computational fluid dynamic analysis to investigate the optimal ratio of heights between the top microchannel and the tank and their geometry at various flow rates. Thereafter, the results are compared with the experimental findings of the fabricated devices. These results are contrasted with some recent reported works to verify the proposed device's contribution to the improvement in the quality and quantity of the extracted plasma. The optimized design is capable of achieving a 19% yield with purity of 77.1%, depending on the requirement of the point-of-care (POC) application. These amounts could be tuned, for instance to 100% pure plasma, but the yield would decrease to 9%. In this study, the candidate application is hemostasis; therefore, the BPS is integrated to a biomimetic surface for hemostasis evaluation near the patients.