An effective splitting-and-recombination micromixer with self-rotated contact surface for wide Reynolds number range applications

It is difficult to mix two liquids on a microfluidic chip because the small dimensions and velocities effectively prevent the turbulence. This paper describes two 2-layer PDMS passive micromixers based on the concept of splitting and recombining the flow that exploits a self-rotated contact surface to increase the concentration gradients to obtain fast and efficient mixing. The designed micromixers were simulated and the mixing performance was assessed. The mixers have shown excellent mixing efficiency over a wide range of Reynolds number. The mixers were reasonably fabricated by multilayer soft lithography, and the experimental measurements were performed to qualify the mixing performance of the realized mixer. The results show that the mixing efficiency for one realized mixer is from 91.8% to 87.7% when the Reynolds number increases from 0.3 to 60, while the corresponding value for another mixer is from 89.4% to 72.9%. It is rather interesting that the main mechanism for the rapid mixing is from diffusion to chaotic advection when the flow rate increases, but the mixing efficiency has not obvious decline. The smart geometry of the mixers with total length of 10.25 mm makes it possible to be integrated with many microfluidic devices for various applications in μ-TAS and Lab-on-a-chip systems.