A Planar Micromixer Based on Sequential Logarithmic Spirals

Despite the advances made in recent years, mixing on the micro-scale remains a challenge. In typical microchannel flows, the lack of turbulence, evidenced by very low Reynolds numbers, constrains mixing to the natural time scale of diffusion. Peclet numbers, defined as the ratio of convective to diffusive transport, are typically very large in microfluidic applications, where transport is dominated by convection. As a result, a dedicated micromixing element is an integral part of most BioMEMS devices [1].