Computational Characterization of Passive Fluid Mixing in Microfluidics

Abstract

In this work we computationally characterize fluid mixing in a number of passive microfluidic mixers. Generally, in order to systematically study and characterize mixing in realistic fluid systems we (1) compute the fluid flow in the systems by solving the stationary three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations or Stokes equations with a finite element method, and (2) compute various measures indicating the degree of mixing based on concepts from dynamical systems theory, i.e., the sensitive dependence on initial conditions and mixing variance.

Untitled

“…In order to motivate our results, we briefly describe the Ph.D. thesis [Sve06] by E. D. Svensson of ordinary differential equations. Here x ∈ Ω is the starting point of the particle path and u is the velocity field obtained by solving (1.1).…”

Local pointwise a posteriori gradient error bounds for the Stokes equations

“…In order to motivate our results, we briefly describe the PhD thesis [24] by E. D. Svensson. It considers the problem of computationally characterizing mixing in incompressible flows.…”