Design for Efcient Micro-mixer Design Based on Split-Recombination

Anil Kumar RamRakhyani, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

AbstractMicromixer is an integrated part of the microuidic system design and traditionally used for analytical chemistry and life science. There has been active research to design an efcient micromixer that requires low pressure to sustain the input ow rate and has a small foot print on the microuidic chip. In this design, the performance of the micromixer is studied for different design parameters and a novel split-recombination based micromixer is presented that can achieve more than 90 % mixing efciency and 150 Pa pressure drop for ow rate of 1 ml/hr. The designed micromixer is fabricated using soft lithography and measured data is compared with the simulation results.

in Section IV and compared with the simulations. Section V discusses the performance analysis of the mixer along with future modications. II. M IXER D ESIGN We aim to achieve high mixing efciency between two uids for a wide range of ow rates. To ensure a low pressure drop from the inlet to the outlet, cross section area of the channel should be high enough to reduce the ow resistance. In this design, the channel height of 100 m is aimed. Channel width is one of the design parameter that needs to be optimized to achieve a trade-off between the pressure drop and mixing efciency. The following section provides the design methodology for the current micromixer. A. Design Approach The designed mixer needs to be tested with the output ow rates of 0.1 ml/hr, 1 ml/hr and 10 ml/hr. For inlets width of 300 m, input ow velocity is computed to calculate the Reynolds number and the mixing time. In general, the micromixer has Reynolds number (Re) below 100 which is a very small value as compared to the turbulent threshold (Re > 2300) [?]. In current design, Reynolds number is calculated based on Equation 1, which ranges from 0.069 to 6.9 for the ow rate of 0.1 ml/hr to 10 ml/hr, respectively. uDH (1) 4 Area DH = (2) Perimeter where u, , are the velocity, density, and viscosity of the input uids, respectively. For laminar ow of the uids, diffusion is one of the dominant mechanisms for the uid mixing. For the same mixing time, mixing efciency increases with the reduction of diffusion length [?], [?]. To reduce the diffusion length between the streams of two input uids, the split-recombination technique is used in which each inlet is subdivided into multiple streams and recombined with the other uid alternatively. This technique enhances the mixing efciency signicantly without the requirement of multiple inlets or a thinner channel. For higher ow rate, chaotic advection can improve the mixing efciency, which can be generated by different techniques. One type of methodology is called Deans Effect and requires curved channels. Re =

I. I NTRODUCTION Micromixer is one of the key components of microuidic chip design. In the microscale regime, where the feature size is below 500 m, laminar ow of the liquids reduces the mixing efciency between two liquids [?]. Thus, micromixing has become a crucial process for micrototal analysis system ( TAS). Based on different mixing techniques, micromixers are classied into two categories named passive and active mixer. Despite the good mixing efciency of the active micromixers, passive micromixers have become more popular due to their low complexity [?]. Diffusion and chaotic advection are two popular mechanisms that can achieve efcient mixing in the microchannels. There are multiple approaches taken that includes T- or Yshaped mixers, parallel and serial lamination and focused enhanced mixers [?], [?]. The mixers performance is characterized by their mixing efciency, pressure drop, mixing time, and fabrication complexity. Thus, the optimum design of a passive micromixer, that can be fabricated reliably with fewer fabrication steps, is an active research in microuidic chip design [?]. In this current design, we designed a passive micromixer based on parallel lamination in which the input liquids are split and recombine into multiple streams. In the parallel lamination technique, the diffusion length can be reduced signicantly to facilitate efcient mixing. In this design, a novel inlet design is proposed to split the input streams of both input liquids and recombine them in an alternative order to create the parallel lamination. This work targets the design and optimization of an efcient micromixer. Section II provides the FEM based numerical modeling of the micromixer to analyze the effect of different design parameters on the efciency. Section III provides the fabrication process for the SU-8 based mold and fabrication of PDMS based micromixer. Measurement results are discussed

In this current design, multiple features are targeted to ensure high mixing efciency and low pressure drop. To achieve the same pressure drop between the split and recombination center of the uids, a symmetric design with equal channel length should be used. For channel width of W at the recombination region, N number of input splitting reduces the diffusion length to W /N between the two uids. The curved channel is used after the recombination to generate Deans Effect. The current mixer is a two layer design and doesnt require a intermediate membrane layer. B. Numerical Simulation Mixing efciency and pressure drop depends on the mixers structure and dimensions. Thus, to design an optimum mixer, a detailed study of the mixers parameters needs to be done. Numerical simulation is one of the practical approaches to simulate the effect of each parameter to identify the tradeoff between different design parameters. In the current work, FEM (Finite Element Method) based numerical simulator (COMSOL MultiPhysics 4.3a) is used for the 3-dimensional microuidic simulation of the micromixer. To ensure the accuracy of the simulation, ner mesh is used to represent the 3-D model of the mixer. A convergence test is performed, for which the number of mesh cells are increased from 300 thousand elements to 1.3 million. It shows the variation in the mixing efciency is less than 0.1 % conrming the accuracy of the solution. Effectiveness of the split-recombination based micromixer depends on the structure and dimension of the split channels (Fingers) and interaction between the ngers. Two input inlets are split in multiple ngers and these ngers cross each other on the upper and lower layer of the mixer. In this study, the effect of the nger count per inlet, angles of crossing between the ngers, and ngers width is discussed as a part of efcient inlet design. Figure 1 shows the inlets conguration and mixing efciency for 2 ml/hr outow rate. Comparison of Figure 1(a) and (b) shows that for angle of crossing of 90o , mixing efciency is higher however routing of the input inlets is difcult for conguration (a). The angle of crossing is dened as the outer angle between the outmost nger to the horizontal line parallel to the width of the recombination region. For the same number of ngers per inlet, increasing the width of the nger as compared to channel height signicantly reduces the mixing efciency (Figure 1(b) and (c)). By removing the left most nger for each inlet and placing circular obstacles after the recombination region, mixing efciency improve signicantly as shown in Figure 2 (a) and (b). To improve the mixing efciency above 90%, the design is extended with curved channels to incorporate Deans ow. Figure 2 (c) and (d) shows that mixing efciency is above 90 % and doesnt improve signicantly with placement of obstacle holes in the curved channel. C. Simulation Results Based on the parametric optimization of the micromixer for maximum mixing efciency and lowest pressure drop, design

Fig. 1. Parametric variation of design feature: (a) Inlet conguration with 90o crossing angle (b) 4-nger inlet with channel width 150 m and 120o crossing angle (c) 4-nger inlet with channel width 74 m (d) 4-nger inlet with gap of 300 m between the combination point. All efciency is for the output ow rate of 2ml/hr.

Fig. 2. (a) Inlet design with 3 ngers each inlets,(b) Extended recombination channel with circular obstacles (c) Curved channel extension of the mixer, (d) Curved channel with circular obstacles.

2 (c) is chosen as the nal micromixer. The optimization is performed using three key parameters that includes (1) number of ngers per inlet, (2) width to the height ratio at the ngerss overlapping region between two layers, and (3) number and position of the circular obstacles after recombination of input uids as shown in Section II-B. To characterize the mixer performance for different ow rates, numerical simulation is performed. Figure 3 shows the concentration prole of the two liquids inside the mixer and required input pressure for output ow rates of 0.1ml/hr, 1ml/hr, and 10 ml/hr. As shown in Table I, the mixing efciency improves with the reduction of the ow rate, which is expected from the

Fig. 4.

(a) Upper and (b) lower layer of the micromixer.

III. FABRICATION AND E XPERIMENTAL S ETUP A. Mold Creation To create the PDMS based micromixer, the SU-8 based mold is chosen due to its stability at curing temperature, creation of high aspect ratio channel, and well-dened process parameters. SU-8 is a negative photoresist requiring a dark mask of the design features. Before spreading the SU-8 over the 4 diameter Si-wafer, the wafer is cleaned and dehydrated at 100o C for 5 minutes to improve the adhesion of the SU-8 over wafer. In our design, we aim to achieve the channel height of 100 m. To achieved that, the SU-8 is spun coated over the wafer at 1500 rpm for 30 seconds followed by a high speed uniformity step for 45 seconds. The pattern is transferred to the SU-8 coated wafer using a dark mask in the suss aligner with UV exposure. Repeated UV exposure of 5 seconds ON and 10 seconds OFF is done for 25 times at 7mJ /cm2 /sec exposure power density. The wafer is cleaned using IPA and a N2 gun. The wafer is post-exposure baked on a hot plate for 5 minutes at 70o C followed by 10 minutes baking at 100o C. To remove any dust particles, the wafer is cleaned using the IPA solution. Due to UV exposure, the location where mixers features are exposed have hardened. To develop the features, the wafer is agitated in a SU-8 developer for 10 minutes and rinsed by IPA to clean the wafer. To remove the microcracks in the SU-8 surface the wafer is annealed for 5 minutes at 250o C. Figure 5 shows the features of micro-mixer in the SU-8 mold under the microscope. The current micromixer is a two layer design and both the layers are patterned on the same SU-8 mold. B. Characterization D. Pre-fabrication To fabricate the micromixer, a negative mask needs to be created to pattern the SU-8 based mold. The current micromixer is a two-layer design. Thus, to create the mask, the upper and lower layers of the design is exported as dxf les. Figure 4 shows the dxf les of the layers. During mask creation, both layers are patterned on the same mask to reduce the number of masks required for the fabrication. To characterize the surface, the wafer is aligned in the surface prolometer and a feature height of 58 m is recorded, as shown in Figure 6. In the original design, the channel height of 100 m was desired, which requires some change in the the process parameter of the SU-8 coating step over the wafer. For soft lithography of the PDMS based micro-mixer, the current SU-8 mold with channel height of 58 m is used. However, in future, higher coating height will be achieved for the mold by reducing the spinner speed [?].

Fig. 3. Concentration prole for the mixer with two input uids at output ow rate of (a) 0.1 ml/hr, (c) 1 ml/hr and (e) 10 ml/hr. Pressure drop along the mixer with two input uids at output ow rate of (a) 0.1 ml/hr, (c) 1 ml/hr and (e) 10 ml/hr.

current diffusion dominant mixer. The pressure drop across the mixer increases linearly with the ow rate. However, the mixing time reduces linearly with the increase of ow rate.
TABLE I S IMULATION R ESULTS Flow Rate (ml/h) 0.1 1.0 10.0 Efciency (%) 96.01 92.23 87.66 Pressure Drop (Pa) 14.75 151.45 1527.4 Mixing Time (sec) 4.4 0.44 0.044

Due to a wide channel width of 200 m, the current mixer requires low pressure to drive the input uids, even for the highest ow rate (10 ml/hr). This pressure can be easily achieved by using on-chip micropumps [?].

Fig. 7. (a) Soft lithography for micromixer using PDMS substrate, (b) aligned layers of the micromixer.

D. Measurement Setup To control the input ow rates in the mixers inlets, an external syringe pump is used. The syringe pump can be congured based on the syringes diameter and desired ow rate. Figure 8(a) shows the syringe pump setup. To connect the syringe pump to the mixer, port connections are made to the inlets and outlet using plastic tubes (Figure 8(b), (c)). To capture the concentration prole of the input and output liquid ow, the mixer is placed under the microscopes focal plane. To measure the pressure drop across the mixer, a pressure gauge is used between the syringe pump output and mixers inlet 1.

Fig. 5. Perspective view of the (a) upper layers and (b) lower layers features in the SU-8 mold. Top view of the (c) upper layers and (d) lower layers features in the SU-8 mold.

Fig. 6.

Height of the SU-8 features under the surface prolometer.

C. Soft-lithography PDMS based microuidic components are well known designs to perform biological studies [?], [?]. To transfer the mixers features in the PDMS substrate, silicone is mixed with the platinum based hardener at 10:1 volumetric ratio. The mixer is degassed for 15 minutes to remove the trapped bubbles. The silicone mixer is poured over the SU-8 based mold. To ensure good bonding between the layers, the PDMS is partially cured inside a covered aluminium box and placed on a hot plate for 7 minutes at 100o C. The cured PDMS (Figure 7 (a)) is peeled off from the mold and cut in rectangular shapes featuring the mixers layers. To create the port connection, inlets and outlet are drilled using the coring tool. To remove the adsorbed dust particles, the upper and lower layers are washed using soap water and dehydrated with the N2 gun. The layers are aligned under the microscope followed by full curing on a hot plate for 15 minutes at 130o C. Figure 7(b) shows that the micromixer achieves good alignment accuracy between layers.

Fig. 8.

(a) Syringe pump setup. Micromixer with port connection (b), (c).

IV. M EASUREMENT R ESULTS To characterize the mixing efciency of the mixer, glass syringes are lled with two different colored uids (water and water with green dye). At the steady state ow of the input liquids, the concentration prole of the mixer are captured using camera attached to the microscope. To estimate the mixing efciency from the captured images, an image analysis software ImageJ [?] is used that can import the image le directly and shows the Gray scale prole of the selected region. To calculate the mixing efciency, the Gray scale prole at the outlet is captured which is represented by 52 pixels on the image. The Gray scale value of any point on the captured image depends on the lighting condition, angle of the mixer from the microscopes focus plane, and focus depth. Assuming uniform lighting condition over the mixer, the Gray scale value needs to be normalized with respect to the Gray scale value at the inlets. To calculate the mixing efciency, Equation 3 is

used based on the Gray scale prole at the input and output of the micromixer. Grayinlet 1 Grayinlet 2 Mingray Maxgray NormConcentration StdevConcentration E f f iciency = mean(Grayscale liquid 1) = mean(Grayscale liquid 2) = min(Grayinlet 1 , Grayinlet 2 ) = max(Grayinlet 1 , Grayinlet 2 ) Grayoutlet Mingray = Maxgray Mingray = stdev(NormConcentration ) = 100 [1 2 StdevConcentration ] (3)
Fig. 10. (a) Steady state concentration prole in micromixer at 1 ml/hr ow rate. (b) concentration prole at the outlet. (c) Gray scale prole across outlet.

The image data of steady state uid ow is captured for all three ow rates. Figure 9 shows the captured image for 0.1ml/hr ow rate. The concentration prole at the outlet is selected to plot the Gray scale prole and shown in Figure 9. Based on Equation 3, the computed efciency is 71.72 %. For this ow rate, the measured pressure drop is below 600 Pa.

Fig. 11. (a) Steady state concentration prole in micromixer at 10 ml/hr ow rate. (b) concentration prole at the outlet. (c) Gray scale prole across outlet. TABLE II C OMPARISON Fig. 9. (a) Steady state concentration prole in micromixer at 0.1 ml/hr ow rate. (b) concentration prole at the outlet. (c) Gray scale prole across outlet. Flow Rate (ml/h) 0.1 1.0 10.0 Efciency Simulated (%) 96.01 92.23 87.66 Efciency Measured (%) 71.72 74.38 74.41 Pressure Simulated 14.75 151.45 1527.4 Pressure Measured < 600 Pa 9.65 kPa 27..57 kPa

Similar measurements are done for the ow rate of 1 ml/hr. For this setup, mixing efciency of 74.38 % and pressure drop of 9.65 kPa is measured. Figure 10 shows the captured image of mixers concentration prole and Gray scale prole at the output. For the ow rate of 10 ml/hr, the computed mixing efciency is 74.41 %. Pressure drop for this setup is measure as 27.57 kPa. Figure 11 shows the concentration prole across the channel. Comparison between the simulated and measured mixing efciency and pressure drop is done in Table II. It can be seen that for all the ow rates, simulated and measured values are considerably different from each other. V. D ISCUSSION As seen in Table II, the measured efciency and pressure drop does not change linearly with the ow rate, which was not expected from the numerical simulations. There are few possible reasons which reduces the mixing efciency considerably and can cause the non-linear behaviour of the

mixer. These effects include the reduction of channel height during fabrication, effect of layers alignment, trapped bubbles, uid folding, and analysis mechanism of the image data. A. Effect of Channel Height During the inlet design, the effect of the channel width at the ngers crossings are studied and found that a wider channel compared to the channel height results in lower mixing efciency (Figure 1(b),(c)). During the fabrication process of the SU-8 based mold, the measured height is 58 m compared to an intended 100 m height (Figure 6). To estimate the effect of channel height, the mixer is re-simulated with the channel height of 58 m and compared with the original design. Figure 12 shows that due to reduction in the channel height, the ow and mixing prole of the input liquids changes signicantly. As compared to 100 m high channel, simulation

of the fabricated mixer results in the mixing efciency of 77 % at 1 ml/hr output ow rate, which is very close to the measured efciency for the same ow rate. Thus, it is expected that using new SU-8 mold with height 100 m, mixing efciency will improve considerably.

Fig. 13. Concentration prole of two liquids along the micromixer showing 3-D mixing.

Fig. 12. (Simulation of the micromixer for channel height of (a) 100 m and (b) 58 m. Simulation is done for output ow rate of 1 ml/hr.

B. Effect of Layers Alignment and Bubbles The current design is a two-layer design. Thus, it requires alignment between the two layers. Slight mismatch in the alignment can create shape corners near the recombination region causing trapped bubbles. In the mixer design, trapped bubbles can cause ow prole variation and results in low mixing efciency and non-linear performance. Figure 11 shows the trapped bubbles in the mixer near one of the ngers output. Due to these trapped bubbles, the non-linearity in mixing efciency and pressure drop is achieved (Table II). For higher ow rate, the bubble can be pushed to a different position resulting into a different channel prole compared to low ow rate. The simulation of a mixer, including the effect of bubbles and alignment, is hard to perform. Thus, to achieve linearity in mixing efciency, trapped bubbles need to be removed in the vacuum chamber. In general, the bubbles are trapped near the sharp corner. Thus, the design features can be modied to reduce the chances of air bubble trapping. C. Fluid Folding and Image Analysis In the current characterization of the concentration prole, the image is captured from the top of the channel, which only shows the 2-dimensional concentration prole. Figure 13 shows the simulated concentration prole of the two liquids and demonstrates that the micromixer achieves a high efciency due to 3-dimensional mixing. During the liquid ow in the mixer, one liquid folds over the other one due to edges and corners in the mixer. Thus, a 2-dimensional analysis of mixing efciency is highly susceptible to errors. To improve the accuracy of the measurement, the prole should be captured from both (upper and lower layer) side of the output channel. VI. C ONCLUSION In this work, we designed and optimized a two-layer splitrecombination micromixer that can achieve mixing efciency

higher than 87 % for all ow rate of 0.1 ml/hr, 1 ml/hr, and 10 ml/hr. The current design occupies a small foot print of 2 mm 3 mm and can be easily interfaced with the onchip microuidic components. The design is chosen based on multiple optimization parameters that can improve the mixing efciency and can reduce the pressure drop. We have fabricated the mixer using a soft lithography technique, which achieves a mixing efciency more than 70 % for all the tested ow rates. The difference between the simulated and measured efciency is caused by reduction of channel height during fabrication, layer misalignment, and trapped bubbles. Due to uid folding in the mixer and image capturing conditions, concentration analysis at the outlet provides inaccurate results, which requires multiple efciency analysis at different positions along the outlet. In future designs, a SU-8 mold with 100 m will be used for the mixer fabrication to improve the mixing efciency. R EFERENCES
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