Paper MN-ThP2
Mixing Effect of PDMS Microchannel with Biaxial Orientation Entry and Various Arrangements of Microstructures

Thursday, November 13, 2014, 6:00 pm, Room Hall D

Most active micromixers have the problem of high fabrication cost and low reliability since external actuators and stirrers were involved. In passive mixers, the mixing effect was obtained by changing channel geometry to enlarge the contact surface between different fluids, including serpentine, herringbone, zigzag, twisted, rotating, T-shape and Y-shape channels; and they were preferred due to their easy fabrication and integration in the actual micro system. However, most literatures focused on the studies for mixers with entries on the same plane (i.e. flow directions were all parallel to horizontal plane); in this study, we report a micromixer design with biaxial orientation entries (i.e. flow directions were parallel and vertical to horizontal plane) and investigate the mixing performance by placing various arrangements of rectangular microstructures with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques.

This study aims on achieving good mixing by changing the arrangements of microstructures to activate the interaction between different fluids. In this paper, several major parameters, including the width and height of microstructures, and the inline or staggered arrangements of various rectangular obstacles on the overall mixing channel pressure drop and mixing efficiency all were well predicted and compared. Simulated and experimental results showed that the microstructures played an important part and resulting in good fluid mixing at low Reynolds numbers.