A Study on Stirring Characteristics in a Microchannel With Various Arrangement of Blocks

In this study a newly designed microchannel is proposed. This design comprises periodically arranged simple blocks. In this configuration, the stirring is greatly enhanced at a certain parameter set. To characterize the flow field and the stirring effect both the numerical and experimental methods were employed. To obtain the velocity field, three-dimensional numerical computation to the Navier Stokes equations are performed by using a commercial code, FLUENT 6.0. The fluid-flow solutions are then cast into studying the characteristics of stirring with the aid of Lyapunov exponent. In this study the Lyapunov exponents are computed manually because the commercial code does not provide the corresponding option. In the experiment, flow visualization for the stirring effect is performed by using pure glycerin in one tank and glycerin mixed with a fluorescent dye in the other. The numerical results show that the particles’ trajectories in the microchannel heavily depend on the block arrangement. It was shown that the stirring is significantly enhanced at larger block-height and it reaches maximum when the height is 0.8 times the channel width. We also studied the effect of the block stagger angle, and it turns out that the stirring performance is the best at the block angle 45°.