A novel microfluidic mixer using aperiodic circulation perturbations

Abstract

Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Turkey, 19-21 July, 2010.

This paper investigates the =g enhancement of electrokinetically driven flow in a microchannel with aperiodically spatiotemporal variation in heterogeneous zeta potential. Numerical simulations are performed to analyze the effects of the heterogeneous zeta potential on the fluid flow characteristics in the microchannel and the corresponding mixing performance. In this simulation, aperiodic oscillating sources are derived using the Sprott system. By variation of the scaling factor in the Sprott system, an aperiodic oscillating source of adjustable frequency can obtain to modulate the heterogeneous zeta potential over time. The results indicate that the alternate flow circulations induced by the heterogeneous zeta potential are generated over time within the microchannel to stir the species. This mixing scheme proposed in the study provides an effective mixing performance.