Numerical and experimental investigation of Y-shaped micromixers with mixing units based on cantor fractal structure for
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TECHNICAL PAPER
Numerical and experimental investigation of Y-shaped micromixers with mixing units based on cantor fractal structure for biodiesel applications Imran Shah2 • Shahid Aziz3,4 • Afaque Manzoor Soomro1,5 • Kyunghwan Kim1 • Soo Wan Kim1 Kyung Hyun Choi1
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Received: 27 July 2020 / Accepted: 5 September 2020 Ó Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The biodiesel synthesis intensification can be easily done with the help of microfluidic devices. In this paper, three novel designs are proposed for evaluating mixing performance required for biodiesel preparation. These designs are investigated numerically and then tested experimentally by fabrication of its chips. The current work is focused on the transesterification of sunflower oil with ethanol at room temperature conditions to elaborate on the application of our micromixer for biodiesel synthesis. The mixing of fluids is analyzed in the range of Reynolds number 0.5–100. The designs are proposed based on split and recombination and cantor fraction structure ideas. These designs are YCMSAR, YSMSAR, and YCSMSAR. All these designs are good for effective mixing. However, the YCSMSAR micromixer demonstrates better mixing index of 99.9% at Reynolds number, Re = 100. The effectiveness of our selected design is supported by various plots and contours simulated by COMSOL and by experimental images and supplementary video.
1 Introduction Microfluidics is the science which deals with the study of controlling and manipulating fluids from micro to picoliters in the network of channels from ten to hundred micrometers wide. There are two approaches; macroscale and microscale. Microscale is preferable because of the less material requirement, easy control, higher heat transfer, short reaction times, more safety and low manufacturing cost (Santana et al. 2017). As a result, microfluidics has
& Kyung Hyun Choi [email protected] 1
Department of Mechatronics Engineering, Jeju National University, Jeju, Republic of Korea
2
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan
3
Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Program in Biomedical Engineering, Jeju National University, Jeju, Republic of Korea
4
Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, Jeju National University, Jeju, Republic of Korea
5
Department of Electrical Engineering, Sukkur IBA University, Sindh, Pakistan
attracted some applications (Younis 2019; Santana et al. 2018a) in biological research, agriculture and renewable energy. Microfluidic devices are operated in the laminar flow region. Mixing at low Reynolds number is primarily due to molecular diffusion and its quality is very low (Raza et al. 2018). In laminar flows, mixing is a challenge and requires a special mechanism in the active or passive form (Vatankhah and Shamloo 2018; Shah et al. 2019a). Active micromixers require external energy for creating flow disturbance inside the flow and achieve mixing quickly. The main limitation of acti
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