# Geometry-free prediction of inertial lift forces in microfluidic devices using deep learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08109/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
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- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2026.

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inertial microfluidic devices (IMDs) offer low-cost, high-throughput alternative techniques for many traditional particle- (or cell-) manipulation tasks, but simulating them requires being able to predict particle migration, and thus particle lift forces, under a variety of possible channel geometries. Recent work has demonstrated that machine learning models can be used to drastically speed up these numerical simulations, but doing so required training individual models for every unique channel cross-section type (e.g., rectangular, triangular) -- shifting the burden from the simulation step to the training step. In this paper, we develop a novel approach for predicting particle lift forces that contains no explicit geometric parameters. We train a neural network model using a new parameter set and show that while it performs comparably to existing models on channel geometries in the training set, it is able to generalize to unseen channel geometries far more effectively. We show that the lift force model developed herein can be easily transferred to particle tracing simulation software, where it is capable of predicting particle migration patterns consistent with the literature across a variety of channel designs.