An experimental method for evaluating pressure fields in a microchannel flow was studied using lPIV measurement in conjunction with the pressure Poisson equation. The pressure error due to the influence of numbers of measurement planes, computational grids for solving pressure Poisson equation, and an experimental error in lPIV measurement was evaluated with respect to the exact solution of Navier-Stokes equation for straight microchannel flow. The mean velocity field in microchannel junction flows with bifurcation and confluence was measured by a lPIV system, which consists of a CCD camera and a microscope with an in-line illumination of white light from stroboscopes. The planar velocity fields at various cross-sections of the microchannel flow were measured by traversing the focal plane within a depth of focus of the microscope. The pressure contour in the microchannel flow was evaluated by solving the pressure Poisson equation with the experimental velocity data. The results indicate that the pressure field in the microchannel junction flow agrees closely with the numerical simulation of laminar channel flow, which suggests the validity of the present method.
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