The Design and Simulation for a Novel Electroosmotic Micromixer

The analysis of fluid mixing in microfluidic systems is useful for many biological and chemical applications at the micro scale such as the separation of biological cells, chemical reactions, and drug delivery. The mixing of fluids is a very important factor in chemical reactions and often determines the reaction velocity. However, the mixing of fluids in microfluidics tends to be very slow, and thus the need to improve the mixing effect is a critical challenge for the development of the microfluidic systems. Micromixers can be classified into two types, active micromixers and passive micromixers. Passive micromixers depend on changing the structure and shape of microchannels in order to generate chaotic advection and to increase the mixing area. Thus, the mixing effect is enhanced without any help from external forces. Although passive micromixers have the advantage of being easily fabricated and requiring no external energy, there are also some disadvantages. For example, passive mixers often lack flexibility and power. Passive mixers rely on the geometrical properties of the channel shapes to induce complicated fluid particle trajectories thereby enhancing the mixing effect. On the other hand, active micromixers induce a time-dependent perturbation in the fluid flow. Active micromixers mainly use external forces for mixing including ultrasonic vibration, dielectrophoresis, magnetic force, electrohydrodynamic, and electroosmosis force. However, the complexity of their fabrication limits the application of active micromixers. In this paper we present a novel electroosmotic micromixer using the electroosmotic flow in the cross section to enhance the mixing effect. A DC electric field is applied to a pair of electrodes which are placed at the bottom of the channel. A transverse flow is generated in the cross section due to electroosmotic flow. Numerical simulations are investigated using a commercial software Fluent® which demonstrates how the device enhances the mixing effect. The mixing effect is increased when the magnitude of the electric field increased. The influences of Pe´clet number are also discussed. Finally, a simple fabrication using polymeric materials such as SU-8 and PDMS is presented.