A study on characteristics of fluid flow and mixing in a microchannel with a controlled local electric field

In this study a newly designed microchannel is proposed. This design is comprised of a channel and a series of metal electrodes periodically attached on the both side's surfaces of the channel. In this configuration, the mixing effect is greatly enhanced at a certain parameter values. To characterize the flow field and the mixing effect, both numerical and experimental methods were employed. To obtain the potential field, electric field, and velocity vectors three-dimensional numerical computation was performed by using a commercial code, CFD-ACE+. The fluid-flow solutions were then cast into studying the characteristics of stirring with the aid of mixing index. In this study the mixing index were computed manually because the commercial code does not provide the corresponding tool. In the experiment, flow visualization was performed by using water with fluorescent particles. The numerical results show that the velocity pattern in the microchannel heavily depends on the metal electrodes arrangement on both sides. It was shown that the rotational flow is significantly enhanced by a higher voltage of metal electrode.