The fluid flow and heat transfer performance of thermoplastic microcapillary films

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the evaluation of microcapillary films (MCFs) for microfluidic applications. MCFs are a novel type of low cost plastic film containing continuous arrays of microcapillaries that are extruded from thermoplastics where the capillaries within these films can be round or elliptical with diameters between 30 and 500 µm. The hydrodynamic response of MCFs has been investigated in a series of experiments where the flow within each capillary was laminar with Reynolds numbers up to a maximum of 1800. Pressure drop measurements were consistent with standard laminar flow predictions. A set of experiments involving single- and two-flow systems were conducted to characterize the heat transfer performance of MCFs and the efficacy of heat transfer was found to rank close to that of metallic microfluidic devices. The experimental heat transfer measurements were compared to finite-element model predictions for the MCF geometry and the modelling results were in good agreement with experiment. The overall results demonstrate the viable performance of MCFs for low cost application to examples such as flow within capillaries where temperature profiling is required along the length of the capillaries.