Measuring microfluidic flow rates: monotonicity, convexity, and uncertainty (Q2213687)

The authors consider nonlinear integro-differential equations describing microfluidic measurements, posed in a compact domain \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{ R}^{3}\) corresponding to the laser profile, and written as \(\mathcal{I} =\int_{\Omega }drF(c(r),r)\), \(c_{z}=-g(\xi )B(c(r),r)\), where \(r=(x,y,z)\), \( \mathcal{I}\) is the fluorescence efficiency, \(c\) the concentration of fluorophores, \(F\) a fluorescence rate, \(\xi \) the characteristic radiation received by a fluorophore, and \(g\) and \(B\) characterize the dependence of bleaching on the laser light strength and fluorophore concentration. The main result of the paper proves that, under appropriate hypotheses on \(F\), \(g \), \(B\), the Cauchy problem \(c_{z}=-g(\xi )B(c,z)\), \(c(0)=c_{0}>0\) has a unique solution and \(\mathcal{I}(\xi )\in C^{2}[0,\Xi ]\) is a convex function of \(\xi \). The authors first build a Picard iteration through \( c_{n+1}(z,\xi )=c_{0}-\int_{0}^{\xi }d\zeta \int_{0}^{\zeta }dsG(c_{n},z,s,\zeta )\), \(G(c_{n},z,s,\zeta )=g^{\prime }(\zeta )B(c_{n},s)\exp (-g(\zeta )\int_{s}^{z}dtB_{c}(c_{n},t))\), and they prove a uniform convergence to a solution of the above Cauchy problem. They derive some regularity and monotonicity properties of this solution. They prove that \(\mathcal{I}\) is a strictly monotone decreasing function of \(\xi \).