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A review on micromixers

Micromachines
DOI: 10.3390/mi8090274
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Abstract

Microfluidic devices have attracted increasing attention in the fields of biomedical diagnostics, food safety control, environmental protection, and animal epidemic prevention. Micromixing has a considerable impact on the efficiency and sensitivity of microfluidic devices. This work reviews recent advances on the passive and active micromixers for the development of various microfluidic chips. Recently reported active micromixers driven by pressure fields, electrical fields, sound fields, magnetic fields, and thermal fields, etc. and passive micromixers, which owned two-dimensional obstacles, unbalanced collisions, spiral and convergence-divergence structures or three-dimensional lamination and spiral structures, were summarized and discussed. The future trends for micromixers to combine with 3D printing and paper channel were brought forth as well.

Figures

  • Table 1. Active micromixers reported in recent five years.
  • Figure 1. Schematic of pressure field driven micromixers with (a) a main channel and a side channel; (b) a main channel and multiple side channels; (c) two cross channels; (d) two mixing chambers, two barriers and two pneumatic chambers; and (e) Braille pin actuator. Reproduced with permission from [13,14,64,65].
  • Figure 4. (a) Schematic of the micromixer with Galinstan cap; (b)The deformation of the Galinstan cap by applying sinusoidal signals with different frequencies and magnitudes; (c) Flow velocity vectors (m/s) along the Galinstan surface. Reproduced with permission from [73].
  • Figure 5. Schematic of the sound field driven with (a) “horse-shoe” structure; (b) nitrogen gas; (c) interdigitated electrodes; (d) vibrating membrane; and (e) sidewall sharp-edges. Reproduced with permission from [6,36,43,79,82].
  • Figure 7. (a) Schematic of the magnetic stirring micromixer; (b) Schematic of the magnetic microbeads attracted to the poles of the NiFe feature; (c) Schematic of the microfluidic channel with its floor patterned with NiFe features. Reproduced with permission from [54,84].
  • Figure 7. (a) Schematic of the magnetic stirring micromixer; (b) Schematic of the magnetic microbeads attracted to the poles of the NiFe feature; (c) Schematic of the microfluidic channel with its floor patterned with NiFe features. Reproduced with permission from [54,84].
  • Figure 8. Schematic of the microfluidic system including microchannel, micro-valve, micro-pump and micromixer. Reproduced with permission from [61].
  • Figure 9. Schematic of the alternating current electrothermal micromixer. Reproduced with permission from [63].

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Micromixers - A review

Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering
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CITATION STYLE

APA

Cai, G., Xue, L., Zhang, H., & Lin, J. (2017, September 11). A review on micromixers. Micromachines. MDPI AG. https://doi.org/10.3390/mi8090274

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