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Evaluation Of A Microfluidic Mixer Utilizing Staggered Herringbone Channels: A Computational Fluid Dynamics Approach, Brian Hama

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Microfluidic platforms offer a variety of advantages including improved heat transfer, low working volumes, ease of scale-up, and strong user control on parameters. However, flow within microfluidic channels occurs at low Reynolds numbers, which makes mixing difficult to accomplish. Adding V-shaped ridges to channel walls, a pattern called the staggered herringbone design (SHB), might alleviate this problem by introducing transverse flow patterns that enable enhanced mixing. However, certain factors affecting the SHB mixer’s performance remain largely unexplored.

In this work, a microfluidic mixer utilizing the SHB geometry was developed and characterized using computational fluid dynamics based simulations and complimentary experiments. …