Consideration of Obstacles Configuration in Designing Low Reynolds Number Micromixer for Blood Microfluidic Application

Abstract

Micromixer can be divided into two categories which are active micromixer and passive micromixer. Due to the simple fabrication technology and ease of implementation in a complex microfluidic system, obstacle-based passive micromixers will be the focus in this work. A passive micromixer is depends on low Reynolds number and the channel geometry for mixing effectiveness. In this work, three designs of obstacle based micromixer were designed and evaluated. These micromixers has 237μm channel length, 30μm inlet length, 900 between inlets ports, width and depth are 30μm each. The fluids used for mixing were blood which has 3.0 × 10-3 kg/μms of viscosity and glycerin which has high viscosity than blood (1.49 × 10-3 kg/μms). The fluids used to evaluate the differences in term of their visual performance based image’s standard deviation by plotting the graph and mixing efficiency by calculation. Based on these evaluations, the Y shape with meander structure obstacle design has the best mixing efficiency at the outlet of the channel.