Both the chaotic mixers (Fig.1) adopt a two-layer overlapping channels structure, which is very efficient for fluid manipulations such as stretching and folding, splitting and recombination. Even at extremely low Re (~10), chaotic advection can be generated. Both particle tracing simulation (Fig. 2) and experimental results (Fig.3) show that as the fluids are driven through the mixer, striation...

In this paper, we study the Lyapunov exponents of a micro chaotic mixer to understand the mixing effectiveness under different operating parameters. A simple kinematic micro mixer model is used for the simulated flow visualization and then for the computation of Lyapunov exponents using two different numerical methods. These two methods generate consistent result to corroborate the existence of...

We investigate the enhancement of both mixing and heat transfer in a two-rod mixer for highly-viscous non-Newtonian fluids. The mixer is composed of two vertical, circular rods in a cylindrical tank. Chaotic flows are obtained by imposing the temporal modulations of the rotational velocities of the walls. We study the effects of different stirring protocols, which lead to non-chaotic and chaoti...

Laminar mixing of glycerin in a chaotic mixer is carried by means of the blob deformation method. The mixer was a cylindrical vessel with two rotational blades which move along two different circular paths with a stepwise motion protocol. The flow visualization was performed by marking of the free surface of the flow with a tracer. The effects of controlling parameters such as rotational speed ...

It is difficult to mix solutions in microchannels. Under typical operating conditions, flows in these channels are laminar-the spontaneous fluctuations of velocity that tend to homogenize fluids in turbulent flows are absent, and molecular diffusion across the channels is slow. We present a passive method for mixing streams of steady pressure-driven flows in microchannels at low Reynolds number...

We introduce a new dielectrophoretic particle microconcentrator that combines interdigitated electrodes with a chaotic mixer to achieve high-throughput (>100 microL/min) particle concentration. The interdigitated electrodes use positive dielectrophoresis to attract particles to the surface, while the chaotic mixer circulates the particles to increase the number brought in proximity with the sur...

In microfluidics mixing of different fluids is a highly non-trivial task due to the absence of turbulence. The dominant process allowing mixing at low Reynolds number is therefore diffusion, thus rendering mixing in plain channels very inefficient. Recently, passive chaotic micromixers such as the staggered herringbone mixer were developed, allowing efficient mixing of fluids by repeated stretc...

Multifunctional envelope-type nanodevices (MENDs) are very promising non-viral gene delivery vectors because they are biocompatible and enable programmed packaging of various functional elements into an individual nanostructured liposome. Conventionally MENDs have been fabricated by complicated, labor-intensive, time-consuming bulk batch methods. To avoid these problems in MEND fabrication, we ...