Recent Advances of the Development and Optimization Design of Passive Microfluidic Mixers

Abstract

In recent decades, the micromixers are developing very fast. They have wide application in biology and chemistry. Also, micromixers are widely used in both industry and academia situations. Many research are conducted to find novel design of micromixers. The existing micromixers can be classfied into two categories: active and passive micromixer. Active micromixers need external energy supply whereas passive mixers only use geometric structures to finish mixing. In passive micromixer, the diffusion is the main way to mix fluids. Researching the active micromixer is much more complicated because there are many variables to control. This paper mainly discuss the recent advances of of the development and design principles of passive micromixers. Several types of passive micromixers are studied, such as serpentine mixers and trapezoidal-zigzag mixers. Ways to obtain and measure those passive micromixers are studied, such as the layout optimization method. The main findingas include that the non-rectangular micromixer and the trapezoidal-zigzag mixers shows great mixing performance, and many design of micromixers are obtained by the layout optimization method.