Dr Timm Krüger Won 2018 ERC Starting Grant

Event Date: 8 August 2018 Dr Timm Krüger has won one of the 2018 ERC Starting Grants! The project, entitled "Simulations for Inertial Particle Microfluidics (SIRIUS)", is worth €1.

5M. It will start in early 2019 and run for five years.

Cancer and bacterial infections are projected to kill 18 million people worldwide annually by 2050. Fast and reliable diagnostics are essential for early and targeted treatments. Microfluidics is at the heart of the miniaturisation of diagnostics, enabling novel portable and low-cost point-of-care devices. Inertial particle microfluidics (IPMF) is a novel and competitive method with applications in cancer cell and bacteria separation. Yet, the physics behind IPMF is not well understood, making progress slow and costly. Novel design rules are in urgent need to avoid trial-and-error experiments.

SIRIUS will numerically investigate the underlying physical mechanisms and develop the first predictive toolkit for engineering applications of IPMF. In particular, the effects of particle softness, finite particle concentration and the challenging behaviour of small particles will be explored. SIRIUS will pursue an innovative simulation campaign based on the lattice-Boltzmann method, validated with existing experimental data, to generate both physical insight and scaling laws for simulation-driven design.

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