Manipulating micro-particles is very important in microfluidic applications, such as biomedical flows and self-assembled structures. Here, flows generated by the forced motion of colloidal micro-particles in a microchannel are investigated. The force coupling method combined with the spectral/hp element method is used to numerically simulate the dynamics of the flow, while a penalty method is used to determine the required forces on the particles. The pumping motion is investigated for two specific systems: a peristaltic micro-pump and a gear micro-pump. We verify the accuracy of the simulations and then for each system, we investigate the net flow rate as a function of pump frequency and channel dimension, and present optimization results. The results for the net flow rate are comparable to and within the range of the experimental data.
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