Separation of binary gas mixture in a microchannel with oscillating barriers

Abstract

The time-dependent flow of a neon–argon mixture in a microchannel interrupted by a row of oscillating barriers is numerically studied using the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method in a range of Knudsen numbers from 0.1 to 10 and in a wide range of oscillation frequencies. The emphasis of the study is on the effect of mixture separation. It is demonstrated that in addition to a mid-frequency (“resonance”) regime, as discovered in the author's previous works [Kosyanchuk et al., “Numerical simulation of novel gas separation effect in microchannel with a series of oscillating barriers,” Microfluid. Nanofluid. 21, 116 (2017) and Kosyanchuk and Pozhalostin, “Non-stationary rarefied gas flow in a plane channel with a series of oscillating barriers,” Eur. J. Mech.-B/Fluids 92, 90–99 (2022)], two other enhanced separation regimes at very low and at very high oscillation frequencies are present. It is also demonstrated that the effect in the mid-frequency regime degrades with decreasing Knudsen number and is almost absent for Kn values around 0.1. The effect in the high-frequency regime is shown to be dictated both by the high frequency of barrier oscillations and by the high speed of barrier motion, and it is shown that with decreasing Knudsen number, the impact of barriers speed becomes dominant. The effect in the low-frequency regime is present for all Knudsen numbers and significantly depends on the phases of barrier motion, which is not observed in other regimes. The separation factor in the low-frequency regime also increases with the number of barriers but only up to the level of molecular diffusion. It was also shown that in the low-frequency regime, there is a trade-off between the separation factor and the gas flow rate.