Experimental and Numerical Analysis of Fluid Flow in Microfibers

Abstract

The flow in small geometries is of interest in applications like bioanalysis systems, micro-valves and flow through porous media. The flow generally straight- forward to predict since the flow is stratified and so the geometries are clear-cut. However, once it involves flow through twin scale porous media, the flow gets harder to predict. The flow-through porous media are usually applied to areas like composites manufacturing, paper making and drying of ore pellets. The aim of this paper is to check flows in small geometries with numerical and experimental ways to realize an enlarged understanding of porous media flow. The optical technique best fitted to this sort of geometries is micro image velocimetry (μ-PIV) and numerical calculations are done with computational fluid dynamics (CFD). μ-PIV is employed to analyze the flow in channels with one fiber and with fiber arrays of various patterns and densities. The impact consistency has on flow fields in channels is investigated with CFD.