A novel 3D Tesla valve micromixer for efficient mixing and chitosan nanoparticle production

Abstract

Current three-dimensional micromixers for continuous flow reactions and nanoparticle synthesis are complex in structure and difficult to fabricate. This paper investigates the design, fabrication, and characterization of a novel micromixer that uses a simple spatial Tesla valve design to achieve efficient mixing of multiple solutions. The flow characteristics and mixing efficiencies of our Tesla valve micromixer are investigated using a combination of numerical simulations and experiments. The results show that in a wide range of flow rates, viscoelastic solutions with different concentrations can be well mixed in our micromixer. Finally, experiments on the synthesis of chitosan nanoparticles are conducted to verify the practicability of our micromixer. Compared with nanoparticles prepared by conventional magnetic stirring, the size of nanoparticles prepared by micromixing is smaller and the distribution is more uniform. Therefore, our Tesla valve micromixer has significant advantages and implications for mixing chemical and biological reactions.

Tesla Valve Microfluidics: The Rise of Forgotten Technology

“…Micromixer channels application utilizing TV microfluidics were reported in the literature [10,50,55,[64][65][66][67]. The micromixer harnesses the channel's reverse flow and enhances the mixing in the conjunction channels, especially using multistage TV (Fig.…”

“…Guo et al developed a 3D micromixer with four integrated TVs to uniformly mix the solutions [55]. To evaluate the performance of the micromixer, numerical, simulations and experiments were conducted.…”

Versatile hybrid technique for passive straight micromixer manufacturing by combining pulsed laser ablation, stereolithographic 3D printing and computational fluid dynamics

“…To address this limitation, microfluidic researchers have incorporated micromixing strategies inside of microreactors, which play a crucial role in a broad range of applications including synthesis of nanoparticles, 3,4 selective polymerization, 5,6 chemical analysis, 7 molecular biology 8,9 and point-of-care applications. 10 Consequently, micromixers fall into two main categories: active and passive.…”

Hydraulic–electric analogy for design and operation of microfluidic systems

“…[11][12][13][14][15] Lipid nanoparticles and other functional nanomaterials for drug delivery can be precisely synthesized using microfluidic reactors. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] Nowadays microfluidic systems have become indispensable in scientific and industrial applications, enabling the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic tools as well as expanding our understanding of fundamental biological and chemical processes.…”