Experimental investigation of particle migration in suspension flow through bifurcating microchannels

Abstract

Experimental measurements of velocity and concentration profiles were carried out to study transport of non‐colloidal suspension in bifurcating micro channels for both diverging and converging flow conditions using a combination of mirco‐particle image velocimetry and particle tracking velocimetry techniques. Migration of particles across the streamline was observed and symmetric velocity and concentration profile in the inlet branch becomes asymmetric in the daughter branches. Further migration of particles toward the center of the channel in the outlet branch make the profiles again symmetric. The evolution of velocity and concentration profiles was observed to be different in the symmetric and asymmetric bifurcation channels. The comparison of the streamlines for the fluid and the particles showed significant deviation near the bifurcation region. This may explain why there is unequal flow and particle partitioning during flow of suspension in asymmetric bifurcating channels as reported in many previous studies. © 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 64: 2293–2307, 2018

PyOIF: Computational tool for modelling of multi-cell flows in complex geometries

“…The diverging bifurcations are responsible for non-uniform partitioning of red blood cells within the network [ 61 ]. While there are quantitative data available on the RBC velocity and flux in the daughter branches and it is known that the RBCs have the tendency to enter the daughter branch with the higher flow rate (Zweifach-Fung effect), in some cases an inversion of this effect was observed [ 62 ], so further investigation is needed.…”

Numerical Validation of a Simple Immersed Boundary Solver for Branched Channels Simulations

“…The main aim in this present work is to compare the results of a standard finite volume based method [10], [9] which used the wall fitted grid, with a much simpler finite difference code working on regular Cartesian grid [12] while employing a generic implementation of immersed boundary method. As a test case a channel with single branch inclined at different angles was chosen, similar to geometry used in [16] or [14]. The results of both codes are compared to see whether the simple finite difference and immersed boundary method based code can match the essential flow characteristics resolved by the older standard finite volume code used in some of our previous studies [9], [2].…”

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