Abstract
A microfluidic mixer with a gas bubble filter powered by a thermal bubble actuated nozzle-diffuser micropump is successfully demonstrated. The oscillatory flow generated by the micropump can induce wavy interface to increase the contact area of the mixing liquids and accelerate the mixing process. It is found that the mixing effect can be optimized when the pumping frequency reaches 200Hz in a 200µm wide, 50µm deep microchannel with a pumping volume flow rate of 6.5µl/min. The mixing process is accelerated when the pulse frequency is increased until a certain frequency. Experimental results on normalized gray-scale measurements show that the grayscale values that correspond to the mixing effect increase proportionally to the one-third power of the pumping pulse frequency. In addition to the micromixer, a gas bubble filter based on the working principle of pressure barrier caused by the channel geometry is also demonstrated experimentally. A simple model for estimating the pressure barrier caused by the microchannel geometry is developed.
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