Simulation and evaluation of the performance of the proposed micromixer with particular obstacles

Abstract

Microfluidics is a relatively new field that has a significant effect on various applications, particularly in biology, biomedical, and biotechnological research. Micromixers are important components of microfluidic systems that help to mix two or more fluid species. In this paper, a new micromixer with particular obstacles is designed and its performance in terms of mixing and pressure drop is compared with a simple y-type micromixer through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using COMSOL Multiphysics software. The results showed that the simple y-type micromixer has a low mixing efficiency in the Reynolds number range, while the proposed micromixer shows significantly higher mixing efficiency. In the proposed micromixer, the mixing index is initially reduced by increasing the Reynolds number from 0.5 to 1, and then continuously increasing by further increasing the Reynolds number to more than 10. In general, the proposed micromixer using special barriers leads to the formation of vortices and the dominance of the chaotic advection term over the molecular diffusion, and by using it, it is possible to achieve relatively complete mixing at Reynolds numbers above 50.