A Tesla Valve as a Micromixer for Fe3O4 Nanoparticles

Abstract

A large number of microfluidic applications are based on effective mixing. In the application of water purification, the contaminated water needs to be effectively mixed with a solution that is loaded with nanoparticles. In this work, the Tesla valve was used as a micromixer device in order to evaluate the effect of this type of geometry on the mixing process of two streams. For this reason, several series of simulations were performed in order to achieve an effective mixing of iron oxide nanoparticles and contaminated water in a duct. In the present work, a stream loaded with Fe3O4 nanoparticles and a stream with contaminated water were numerically studied for various inlet velocity ratios and initial concentrations between the two streams. The Navier–Stokes equations were solved for the water flow and the discrete motion of particles was evaluated by the Lagrangian method. Results indicate that the Tesla valve can be used as a micromixer since mixing efficiency reached up to 63% for Vp/Vc = 20 under various inlet nanoparticles rates for the geometry of the valve that was used in this study.