Investigation on Fluid Flow in Biomimetic Microchannel

In this work, a numerical investigation on fluid flow and mixing has been performed on split and recombined microchannels based on Murray’s law. Murray’s law is derived from nature-inspired tree-like structures that are commonly found in living and non-living things. The human cardiovascular system and plant water transport systems are the most famous and investigated examples of such a type of structure. The same concept is introduced to design a micromixer having asymmetric bifurcation in order to solve the mixing problem at the microscale. Mixing at a small scale is a very complicated phenomenon, and due to its integration with bioengineering and chemical investigations, homogeneous and quick mixing has long been a prerequisite for microfluidic devices. In this paper, asymmetric and symmetric bifurcation micromixers were investigated with Reynold’s number ranging from 0.01 to 300. The results demonstrate that almost all the Reynolds number ranging from 0.01 to 300 are better handled by the symmetric bifurcated micromixer. However, for the asymmetric bifurcated micromixer, the increase in mixing index is only seen at Reynold number 300; below that, its efficiency is consistently lower than that of the symmetric micromixer. This is due to the larger daughter vessel dominating the smaller daughter vessel. The ability to take part in the mixing of smaller daughter vessel was obstructed by the bulk flow of the larger daughter vessel. This seems to be the main cause of inadequate mixing. The research reveals that symmetric bifurcated micromixers with ratio \({d}_{1}/{d}_{2}=1.0\) channels are much more effective in design than asymmetric bifurcated micromixers with ratio \({d}_{1}/{d}_{2}=0.6\) channels.