Simulation and evaluation of the performance of the proposedmicromixer with particular obstacles

Microfluidics is a relatively new field that has a significant effect on various applications, particularly inbiology, biomedical, and biotechnological research. Micromixers are important components of microfluidicsystems that help to mix two or more fluid species. In this paper, a new micromixer with particular obstaclesis designed and its performance in terms of mixing and pressure drop is compared with a simple y-typemicromixer through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using COMSOL Multiphysicssoftware. The results showed that the simple y-type micromixer has a low mixing efficiency in the Reynoldsnumber range, while the proposed micromixer shows significantly higher mixing efficiency. In the proposedmicromixer, the mixing index is initially reduced by increasing the Reynolds number from ۵.۵ to ۱, and thencontinuously increasing by further increasing the Reynolds number to more than ۱۵. In general, the proposedmicromixer using special barriers leads to the formation of vortices and the dominance of the chaoticadvection term over the molecular diffusion, and by using it, it is possible to achieve relatively completemixing at Reynolds numbers above ۵۵.

Keywords:

Microfluidics , Micromixer , CFD