Modulation of secondary flows in curved serpentine micromixers

Qamareen, Arees; Ansari, Mubashshir Ahmad; Alam, Shah; Alazzam, Anas

doi:10.1080/00986445.2021.1887153

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Introducing curvature in the ow direction induces centrifugal force, leading to the formation of a pair of circulating vortices perpendicular to the mainstream direction [32,33]. These vortices, also called Dean vortices, result in subsequent chaotic advection, improving the mixing e ciency by folding the uids [34,35]. Following this mechanism, uid mixing has been investigated in serpentine [36], spiral [37], square wave [38], zigzag [39], and convergent-divergent [40] channels.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A stretchable micromixer with enhanced performance for intermediate Reynolds numbers

Fallahi

Zhang

Nicholls

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Chemical reactions in microscale require good mixing at a relatively low flowrate. However, mixing in microscale faces the major challenge of stable laminar flow associated with the low Reynolds number, the relative ratio between inertial force and viscous force. For low Reynolds numbers of less than unity, mixing occurs due to molecular diffusion. For high Reynolds number of more than several tens, chaotic advection enhances mixing. However, in the intermediate regime, mixing is not efficient. This paper reports a stretchable micromixer with dynamically tuneable channel dimensions. Periodically stretching the device changes the channel geometry and the curvature induced secondary Dean flows. The dynamically evolving secondary and main flows in the mixing channel result in chaotic advection and enhance mixing. The concept was demonstrated in a stretchable micromixer with a serpentine channel. We evaluated the performance of this stretchable micromixer both experimentally and numerically. At the intermediate range of Reynolds numbers from 4 to 17, the periodically stretched micromixer showed a better mixing efficiency than the non-stretched counterpart. Therefore, our stretchable micromixer is a potential candidate for applications where precious reagents need to be mixed at relatively low flow rate conditions.

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