This paper was presented at the 3rd Micro and Nano Flows Conference (MNF2011), which was held at the Makedonia Palace Hotel, Thessaloniki in Greece. The conference was organised by Brunel University and supported by the Italian Union of Thermofluiddynamics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Thessaly, IPEM, the Process Intensification Network, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Heat Transfer Society, HEXAG - the Heat Exchange Action Group, and the Energy Institute.We study magnetophoretic capture of magnetic particles in microfluidic devices and present a parametric characterization for the capture efficiency. We model particle transport and capture using a computational fluid dynamic, CFD-based, Lagrangian-Eulerian approach that takes into account the
dominant particle forces and particle-fluid coupling. We introduced two dimensionless groups that characterize particle capture, one that scales the magnetic and hydrodynamic forces on the particle and
another that scales the distance to the magnetic field source. We use the model to parameterize capture efficiency with respect to the dimensionless numbers for both one-way and two-way particle-fluid coupling.
We demonstrate that for dilute suspensions, the simplified one-way coupling analysis marginally underpredicts the capture efficiency computed using the two-way fully coupled analysis.This study is financially supported from the Research Affairs at the UAE University under contract number. 01-05-7-12/10
