Design and Simulation of a Chaotic Micromixer with Diamond-Like Micropillar Based on Artificial Neural Network

Abstract

Abstract Microfluidic mixing is an essential part of the process of microfluidic chip technology in the analysis, and micromixer has also become the key components of microfluidic chip analysis system. For DNA hybridization, protein folding and enzyme reaction, some biochemical processes need to react quickly to achieve on analysis and research has the vital significance. A simple, rapid and low-cost passive micromixer is presented in this paper. In order to improve the mixing efficiency of the species, the concept of a splitting and recombination (SAR) was used to shorten the mixing time of the species. This study simulated the species mixing in a micromixer with traditional T-type micromixer and diamond-like micropillar in laminar flow state through COMSOL multiphysics 3.5a to computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Linking artificial neural network (ANN) and CFD was used to optimize the diamond-like micropillar. Finally, simulation results proved that the micromixer with SAR diamond-like concept achieves a high-efficiency mixing than T-type micromixer. Numerical results also show that the mixing efficiency of the SAR micromixer with diamond-like micropillar can be up to 99 %, and that efficiency can reach rapidly 90 % in a short channel distance.