Abstract
Micro fluidic system holds promise for many novel applications within chemistry, biology and medicine. Mixing at micro scale with in a reasonable time period and length scale is important, but despite a large number of studied, no systematic study has been carried out so far to understand the effect of flow mechanism and geometry on micro fluidic mixing. Present study analyze the mixing of low Reynolds number (< 25) fluids in T-type passive micro mixer under various geometric and flow conditions to analyze their relative effects on mixing by diffusion and dispersion. CFD base steady state numerical simulations were carried out using finite element method. Results from this study shows that required mixing length increases with the increase of Reynolds number and mixing channel width, while there is a considerable decrease in mixing length with the increase of diffusion coefficient and mixing channel aspect ratio.
Highlights
Micro fluidic devices have revolutionized the field of science especially biomedical and biochemical from last few years due to their wide applications in areas such as DNA assay, cell storing [1], high throughput screening, dynamic cell separators [2], surface patterning of cells, proteins and high throughput nucleic acid analysis [3] etc
Mixing at micro level is not straight forward because of certain limitations such as low Reynolds number, low flow speed and small mixing length; possibility to improve mixing by indulgence of turbulence is not practicable mixing in such devices is totally diffusion dependant, which leads to complex design challenges
Investigation of mixing characteristics in T-type passive micro mixer with the variation of flow and geometric parameters reveals that mixing length in T channel is highly influenced by variation of Reynolds number, Peclet number and geometric aspect ratio
Summary
Micro fluidic devices have revolutionized the field of science especially biomedical and biochemical from last few years due to their wide applications in areas such as DNA assay, cell storing [1], high throughput screening, dynamic cell separators [2], surface patterning of cells, proteins and high throughput nucleic acid analysis [3] etc. Mixing methods suitable for macro scale mixing are some time not useable for micro scale mixing due to absence of turbulence, different researchers have proposed different design topologies for improvement of mixing at micro level to induce fast mixing between fluid streams [8] One such design approach is a T type rectangular channel micro mixer, where two fluid streams are able to diffuse across inlet of T junction before subsequent proceeding and uses the Interdiffusion of analyte and indicator to produce a signal change that can be correlated with the physical parameter such as analyte concentration [9]. Present study mainly focuses upon improvement of mixing efficiency in T-type passive micro mixer having a rectangular channel, where two fluid streams of different concentrations are flowing parallel to each other. The least length for complete mixing can be stated as Lm, Lm
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