HYDRODYNAMICS AND MIXING CHARACTERISTICS OF Y-MICROMIXERS

Abstract

Simple fabrication techniques and easy incorporation into complex microfluidic system are some of the many salient features of passive micro-mixers. Flow regime in general being laminar and hence resulting in low mixing efficiency, various proposals like increasing obstacles in the path of flow or generating vortex flow or splitting the inlet channel into sub channels or roughening the channel walls which have been advocated by the researchers for passive micro-mixers are reported in this work. In the present work, a split Y shaped micro-mixer is developed and simulations are carried out to investigate the effect of Reynolds number on mixing efficiency. Before developing Y micro-mixers, fluid flow hydrodynamics and mixing characteristics are studied in a basic T-mixer, horizontal and vertical split T-mixers and results are validated against the numerical results reported in the literature (Roudgar et al, 2012). The mixing performance of split micro-mixers is found to be superior and better than their Basic counterparts. The mass fraction contour plots reveals that for a given flow rate, vertical split mixers induce a much better mixing than horizontal ones.