Study on the mixing characteristics of micromixer based on the vortex-generated structures

According to the mixing principle of vortex-generated enhancing, a passive micromixer arranged with the vortex-generated structures was proposed. Three-dimensional numerical simulation was carried out with adoption of Computational Fluid Dynamic software in this paper. The finite volume method was used to disperse the three-dimensional steady incompressible N-S equations. Mixing index is measure standard used to evaluate the degree of mixing. The effect of mixing performance was analyzed when changing the volume flow from 0.18 μL/min to 1.75 mL/min of this micromixer. Our studies show that the structural parameters, e.g. different aspect ratio of microchannels and the inflow angle of separation channel, have an important effect on the mixing performance. Taking account for the relation between mixing intensity and structural parameters, when symmetrically arranged two double gaps structures with an angle of minus 45 degrees, this passive micromixer could achieve the optimum mixing performance.