Enhanced Convective Mixing and Residence Time Distribution in Advanced Micromixers

Homogeneous mixing of liquids in microchannels is well known and characterized for simple channel geometries, such as Y- or T-shaped mixers. Also meandering mixing channels, in which Dean vortices are generated, are often employed to achieve rapid mixing of liquids. A CFD study was performed to increase the mixing performance in the contacting and first mixing element. Dean vortices in the inlet channels increase the mixing quality for Re numbers in the range from 20 to 200 together with S-shaped mixing elements. Mixing quality is significantly increased by a factor of 2 to more than 5 compared to a T-shaped mixer. The residence time distribution is a further important parameter, which is investigated in this contribution.