Numerical and experimental study on mixing performance of a novel electro-osmotic micro-mixer

This paper presents the numerical and experimental study on mixing enhancement in a novel electro-osmotic micro-mixer in the presence of AC and DC electric fields. PDMS is used for the fabrication of the microchip and gold nanoparticles are employed to make the electrodes. It is demonstrated that the generation of vortices due to electro-osmotic force enhances the mixing quality considerably. The strength of the vortices for DC electric field is higher than that for AC one. The results reveal that the mixing performance can be controlled by the value of applied voltage and inlet velocity of the fluids for both DC and AC electric fields. It is concluded that the mixing performance improves by enhancing the applied voltage and decreasing the inlet velocity. The experimental results are in very good agreement with the numerical ones qualitatively.