Fractal grooves applied to passive micro-mixers

The purpose of the present work is to study on the application of a navel fractal pattern to passives micro-mixers. The SU-8 soft lithography is used to transfer the fractal grooves and the micro channel to PDMS mold on a glass. The authors also used numerical software Fluent to simulate the flow fields of the new passive micro-mixers. The 3 kinds of fractal configurations, three flow conditions (Re=0.64, 6.4, and 64) have been compared with the experimental mixing indices. The simulation results show that the novel fractal pattern do create lateral mass transport to improve mixing. With the same fractal patterns, the lower Reynolds number flow (0.64) has the higher mixing index. The branch with fractal patterns for two times (type III) is also better than other cases with high mixing performance.