Lateral Migration of Neutrally-Buoyant Particles in a Square Microchannel at Low Reynolds Numbers Available to Purchase

Lateral migration of particles has drawn a lot of attention in suspension community for the last 50 years. Since there is no need for extra external forces, lateral migration of particles plays an important role in constructing microfluidic devices in diverse engineering applications. In this paper, an experimental study on lateral migration of neutrally-buoyant spherical particles transported through a square microchannel is carried out using a fluorescent microscope at low Reynolds numbers. Fluorescent microspheres with diameters of d = 6 μm, 10 μm, and 16 μm are adopted as the test particles, which yield channel-to-particle size ratios of 13.3, 8 and 5, respectively. Spatial distributions of the particles in dilute suspension are visualized at different Reynolds numbers. It is shown that particles are uniformly distributed over the channel cross-section at relatively low Reynolds numbers. As the Reynolds number increases, however, particles migrate inward from the wall and away from the central axis of the channel, so that consequently they accumulate at an equilibrium position, exhibiting the so-called “tubular pinch effect”, first observed by Segre´ and Silberberg as early as in 1962. Experimental results obtained in this work offer design rules for microfluidic channels that play important roles of particle separation or particle focusing.