Enhanced mixing in laminar flows using ultrahydrophobic surfaces.

Under laminar, microscale flow conditions, rapid mixing can be difficult to achieve. In these low Reynolds number flows, mixing rates are governed by molecular diffusion, and in the absence of enhanced mixing techniques, mixing lengths and residence times can be much longer than most applications will allow. A number of active mixing techniques have been developed to improve mixing; however, they can be complex to implement and expensive to fabricate. In this paper, we describe a passive mixing method that utilizes a series of ultrahydrophobic surfaces. Our previous experiments have demonstrated that a shear-free air-water interface supported between hydrophobic microridges results in large slip velocities along these ultrahydrophobic surfaces, and significant drag reduction. By aligning the microridges and therefore the air-water interface at an oblique angle to the flow direction, a secondary flow is generated, which is shown to efficiently stretch and fold the fluid elements and reduce the mixing length by more than an order of magnitude compared to that of a smooth microchannel. The designs of the ultrahydrophobic surfaces were optimized through experiments and numerical simulations. A Y-shaped channel was used to bring two streams of water together, one tagged with a fluorescent dye. A confocal microscope was used to measure fluorescence intensity and dye concentration. Quantitative agreement between the experiments and the numerical simulations was achieved for both the flow patterns and degree of mixing. Increasing the angle of the microridges was found to reduce the mixing length up to a critical angle of about 60 degrees , beyond which the mixing length was found to increase with further increases to the angle of the microridge. The mixing enhancement was found to be much less sensitive to changes in microridge width or separation.