RESEARCH ARTICLE


A PDMS Self-Vortical Micromixer Without Obstructions



Chun-You Lin*, 1, Hsien-Chun Meng2, C. Fu1
1 Institute of NanoEngineering and MicroSystems, National Tsing-Hua University;
2 Micro Base Technology Corp, N0.101, Kuang-fu Rd., Sec.II, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan, R.O.C

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2011
Volume: 5
First Page: 7
Last Page: 12
Publisher ID: TOCENGJ-5-7
DOI: 10.2174/1874123101105010007

Article History:

Received Date: 31/01/2011
Revision Received Date: 27/03/2011
Acceptance Date: 01/04/2011
Electronic publication date: 17/5/2011
Collection year: 2011

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Creative Commons License
© 2011 Lin et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to these authors at the Institute of NanoEngineering and MicroSystems, National Tsing-Hua University; N0.101, Kuang-fu Rd., Sec.II, Hsinchu 300, Taiwan, R.O.C; Tel: +886–3-571–5131 ext. 3996; Fax: +886–3-572–8023; E-mail: frankchunyoulin@gmail.com


Abstract

Microfluidic micromixers are extremely essential components of microfluidic systems for microliter to nanoliter fluid mixing. This paper proposes a new passive micromixer called the self-vortical micromixer with no obstructions, composed of three polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) layers. Each PDMS layer is fabricated by a PDMS replication molding process with a 150-micron height dry-film photoresist replication mold, manufactured from an organic solvent-free process. The three PDMS layers are precisely bonded together by the PDMS alignment bonding process developed in this study. This paper presents the simulation results demonstrating the self-vortical mixing phenomenon of the self-vortical micromixer with swirly flow fields and self-vortical flow fields. As the mixing test results demonstrate the mixing performance of the micromixer, the injected food dyes are completely mixed in the downstream of the mixing channel by the swirly flow fields and the self-vortical flow fields in the circular mixing chamber of the self-vortical micromixer. At Re =200, effective mixing (mixing index 0.42) can be achieved..

Keywords: Micromixer, CFD-ACE simulation, self-vortical flow.