Abstract

Microfluidic mixers are extensively used in many fields including chemical, food industry, biomedical, healthcare, biochemical and other applications. In general, microfluidics mixer can be categorized as “active mixers” and “passive mixers” where active mixers demand external energy input, such as thermal energy, acoustic wave, magnetic and electrokinetic to improve mixing efficiency in contrast to the passive mixer which employs no external energy. In this abstraction, we have proposed a novel design of micro mixer based on passive mixer technique. Numerical simulation has been performed to optimize the performance of mixers. Further, the significance of geometry is demonstrated by the appropriate employment of obstacles in the channel by applying the leakage concept. It is observed that the channel with non-leaky obstacles has better mixing performance in comparison to channel with leaky obstacles and channel without obstacles. The channel has achieved the mixing because of the generation of secondary flow and vortices which occur due to the presence of obstacles. This micromixer has achieved complete mixing of fluids within few seconds or some milliseconds, which is certainly acceptable to utilize in biological applications such as cell dynamics, drug screening, toxicological screening and others.