Chaotic Advection and Targeted Mixing

Chaotic advection and targeted mixing.

The advection of passive tracers in an oscillating vortex chain is investigated. It is shown that by adding a suitable perturbation to the ideal flow, the induced chaotic advection exhibits two remarkable properties which do not hold in the case of a generic perturbation: Particles remain trapped within a specific domain bounded by two oscillating barriers (suppression of chaotic transport alon...

Mixing, Chaotic Advection, and Turbulence

The establishment of a paradigm for mixing of fluids can substantially affect the development of various branches of physical sciences and technology. Mixing is intimately connected with turbulence, Earth and natural sciences, and various branches of engineering. However, in spite of its universality, there have been surprisingly few attempts to construct a general framework for analysis. An ex...

Microfluidic mixing via acoustically driven chaotic advection.

Mixing presents a notoriously difficult problem in small amounts of fluids. Herein, surface acoustic waves provide a convenient technique to generate time-dependent flow patterns. These flow patterns can be optimized in such a way that advected particles are mixed most efficiently in the fluid within a short time compared to the time pure diffusion would take. Investigations are presented for t...

Chaotic Advection Enhanced Remediation

Experimental test of scaling of mixing by chaotic advection in droplets moving through microfluidic channels.

This letter describes an experimental test of a simple argument that predicts the scaling of chaotic mixing in a droplet moving through a winding microfluidic channel. Previously, scaling arguments for chaotic mixing have been described for a flow that reduces striation length by stretching, folding, and reorienting the fluid in a manner similar to that of the baker's transformation. The experi...