Chaotic mixer using electro-osmosis at finite Péclet number

Abstract

Two pressure-driven streams of two miscible liquids can only mix by diffusion in microfluidic channels because of the low Reynolds number. We present an idea to generate mixing by "chaotic advection" in microscale geometries. That is, we consider using induced-charge electro-osmosis to generate a second flow and then modulate between the pressure-driven and induced-charge flows. By using the combined method consisting of the boundary element method, the Lagrangian particle tracking method, and the random-walk method, we analyze mixing efficiency, mixing time, and mixing length, with the effects of modulation frequency and molecular diffusivity, and compare our proposed mixer with other mixers. By this analysis, we find that chaotic mixing can be produced efficiently in a microfluidic channel by switching between pressure-driven and induced-charge flows in a wide range of Péclet number under the specific condition of Strouhal number. By using our proposed mixer, we can expect to realize efficient chaotic mixing with minimum voltage in an ordinary flow channel with a simple structure without an oblique electric field even at large Péclet number.