Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Liquid Residue in 90° Bend Microchannel Based on Gas–Liquid Two-Phase Flow

The microfluidic chip for nucleic acid detection in vitro is an essential application of microfluidic technology to the process of in vitro diagnosis. The 90° bend microchannels in chip designed for facilitating assay reagent delivery may cause reagent residues and cast mutual contamination between detection reagents, which significantly affects the detection accuracy. In this paper, a two-dimensional gas–liquid two-phase flow model is constructed to simulate the liquid residue phenomenon. Using the results of simulation, the residual liquid generation can be observed and the area of residual liquid can be obtained. The accuracy of the numerical simulation is verified by comparison with the experimental results. The effects of the fillet radius R, the diameter ratio d1/d2 of the vertical to horizontal sections, the flow velocity v, and the surface roughness Ra on the residual amount are studied. We find that the fillet radius is inversely proportional to the residual amount within the range v = 20–100 mm/s and there is almost no liquid residue in the channel when the radius increases to R = 1 mm. When the channel diameter ratio d1/d2 increases, the liquid residual amount also increases by approximately 98%. The increased surface roughness Ra significantly increases the residual amount. The results of this study provide a reference for the optimal design of microchannels on chips.