A Simple and Low Cost Micromixer for Laminar Blood Mixing: Design, Optimization, and Analysis

Abstract

The paper presents a design of micromixer for laminar blood mixing. In order to minimize the space usage for micromixer of an automatic sample collection system, a splitting and recombination (SAR) concept was employed to reduce the diffusion distance of the fluids. Moreover, ellipse-like micropillars were introduced to this concept to increase the mixing performance of micromixer. With software (COMSOL 4.3) for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) we simulated the mixing of fluids in a micromixer with ellipse-like micropillars and basic T-type mixer in a laminar flow regime. Numerical results illustrate that the micromixer with SAR concept achieves an outstanding mixing efficiency than the one without SAR concept. Numerical results also show that the SAR micromixer with ellipse-like micropillars is up to 99% efficient, and that efficiency reaches 90% in a short distance. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.