Liao Wuxia, Wang Ning, Wang Taisheng, Xu Jia, Han Xudong, Liu Zhenyu, Zhang Xuming, Yu Weixing
State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics , Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 3888, Dongnanhu Road, Changchun, Jilin, People's Republic of China.
Key Laboratory of Spectral Imaging Technology, Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , No. 17, Xinxi Road, Xian 710119, People's Republic of China.
Biomicrofluidics. 2016 Feb 26;10(1):014123. doi: 10.1063/1.4942947. eCollection 2016 Jan.
This paper reports a biomimetic design of microchannels in the planar reactors with the aim to optimize the photocatalytic efficiency of water purification. Inspired from biology, a bifurcated microchannel has been designed based on the Murray's law to connect to the reaction chamber for photocatalytic reaction. The microchannels are designed to have a constant depth of 50 μm but variable aspect ratios ranging from 0.015 to 0.125. To prove its effectiveness for photocatalytic water purification, the biomimetic planar reactors have been tested and compared with the non-biomimetic ones, showing an improvement of the degradation efficiency by 68%. By employing the finite element method, the flow process of the designed microchannel reactors has been simulated and analyzed. It is found that the biomimetic design owns a larger flow velocity fluctuation than that of the non-biomimetic one, which in turn results in a faster photocatalytic reaction speed. Such a biomimetic design paves the way for the design of more efficient planar reactors and may also find applications in other microfluidic systems that involve the use of microchannels.
本文报道了平面反应器中微通道的仿生设计，旨在优化水净化的光催化效率。受生物学启发，基于默里定律设计了一种分叉微通道，用于连接到光催化反应的反应室。微通道设计为具有50μm的恒定深度，但纵横比可变，范围从0.015到0.125。为了证明其对光催化水净化的有效性，对仿生平面反应器进行了测试，并与非仿生反应器进行了比较，结果表明降解效率提高了68%。通过采用有限元方法，对设计的微通道反应器的流动过程进行了模拟和分析。发现仿生设计的流速波动比非仿生设计的大，这反过来又导致光催化反应速度更快。这种仿生设计为更高效的平面反应器设计铺平了道路，也可能在其他涉及微通道使用的微流体系统中找到应用。
