Numbering-up strategies for microfluidics-assisted water treatment processes. Deterministic lateral displacement for the removal of bacteria and parasites as a case study

Microfluidic channels filled with spatially periodic arrays of impermeable obstacles have been proved successful for the size-based continuous separation of mesoscopic objects suspended in a buffer solution with unprecedented resolution. To date however, this technique - referred to as Deterministic Lateral Displacement (DLD) - has been implemented only for small volume samples, mainly for analytical purposes. In this article, we investigate the feasibility of the DLD separation technique for water purification from bacteria. The accurate numerical solution of the three-dimensional Stokes flow problem is used to establish the hydraulic resistance of several different geometries of the unit periodic cell. Results suggest that DLD-based microfilters resulting from numbering-up DLD microseparation units could provide sizeable flowrates and could prove competitive when compared to membrane-based modules.