Computational Characterization of Passive Fluid Mixing in Microfluidics

In this work we computationally characterize fluid mixing in a number of passive microfluidic mixers. Generally, in order to systematically study and characterize mixing in realistic fluid systems we (1) compute the fluid flow in the systems by solving the stationary three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations or Stokes equations with a finite element method, and (2) compute various measures indicating the degree of mixing based on concepts from dynamical systems theory, i.e., the sensitive dependence on initial conditions and mixing variance.