Janakiraman Vijayakumar, Sastry Sudeep, Kadambi Jaikrishnan R, Baskaran Harihara
Department of Chemical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH, 44106, USA.
Biomed Microdevices. 2008 Jun;10(3):355-65. doi: 10.1007/s10544-007-9143-6.
Methods involving microfluidics have been used in several chemical, biological and medical applications. In particular, a network of bifurcating microchannels can be used to distribute flow in a large space. In this work, we carried out experiments to determine hydrodynamic characteristics of bifurcating microfluidic networks. We measured pressure drop across bifurcating networks of various complexities for various flow rates. We also measured planar velocity fields in these networks by using particle image velocimetry. We further analyzed hydrodynamics in these networks using mathematical and computational modeling. Our results show that the experimental frictional resistances of complex bifurcating microchannels are 25-30% greater than that predicted by Navier-Stokes equations. Experimentally measured velocity profiles indicate that flow distributes equally at a bifurcation regardless of the complexity of the network. Flow division other than bifurcation such as trifurcation or quadruplication can lead to heterogeneities. These findings were verified by the results from the numerical simulations.
涉及微流体的方法已被用于多种化学、生物和医学应用中。特别是，分叉微通道网络可用于在较大空间中分配流体。在这项工作中，我们进行了实验以确定分叉微流体网络的流体动力学特性。我们测量了各种流速下不同复杂度的分叉网络的压降。我们还使用粒子图像测速技术测量了这些网络中的平面速度场。我们进一步使用数学和计算模型分析了这些网络中的流体动力学。我们的结果表明，复杂分叉微通道的实验摩擦阻力比纳维 - 斯托克斯方程预测的大25 - 30%。实验测量的速度剖面表明，无论网络的复杂度如何，流体在分叉处均匀分布。除分叉外的分流，如三分叉或四分叉，会导致不均匀性。这些发现通过数值模拟结果得到了验证。
