Construction of a reduced-order model of an electro-osmotic micromixer and discovery of attractors for petal structure

Abstract

The chaotic state of microfluidic devices such as electroosmotic micromixers has received extensive attention. Its unsteady flow and multi-physics mask low-dimensional structure and potential attractors. Based on the dynamic mode decomposition and the sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics, this study aims to construct a manifold equation with the minimum degree of freedom, reveal the mixing mechanism of micromixers, and discover the evolution of chaotic states. The attenuation degree of freedom was introduced to force the modal coefficients to be pure oscillations. The six, four, and two-dimensional minimum reduced-order models (ROMs) were constructed under different mixing conditions. The nonlinear dynamics evolves on attractors resembling a six-petal structure based on the amplitude-phase method. The attractor periodicity and decay map the evolution of the periodic oscillation and limit cycle of the active modes and are related to the appearance of the low-energy dominant non-axisymmetric modes. These results emphasize the significance of ROM technology in revealing the low-dimensional structure and attractor of the electroosmotic micromixer.