Analysis of a vibrating-beam-based micromixer

The mixing of two or more streams in microscale devices is a slowly molecular diffusion process due to the unique laminar flows, and some 'turbulence' based mixing technologies which are effective in macroscales become hard to implement in such small dimensions. The chaotic advection based mixing, depending on the stretching and folding of interface, has been proved to be effective for low Reynolds numbers (Re) and is a very promising technology for micro mixing. We propose a new mixing concept based on a vibrating micro-beam in microfluidic channels to generate chaotic advection to achieve an efficient mixing. The simplicity of the proposed mixer design makes microfabrication process easy for practical applications. The feasibility of the concept is evaluated computationally and moving mesh technique (ALE) is utilized to trace the beam movement. The simulation shows that the mixing quality is determined by parameters such as flow velocities, amplitudes and frequencies of vibrating beam. The Reynolds number (Re) is less than 2.0, Pelect number (Pe) ranges from 5 to 1000, and Strohal number (St) 0.3 to 3.0. It was found that vortex type of flows were generated in microchannel due to the interaction between beam and channel wall. The mixing efficiency with this design is well improved comparing with the flows without beam vibration.