• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.513-523
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• 2014

A fluid transport technique is a key issue for the development of microfluidic systems. In this study, the movement of a droplet on horizontal hydrophilic/hydrophobic surfaces, which is a new concept to transport droplets without external power sources that was recently proposed by the author, was simulated using an in-house solution code(PowerCFD). This code employs an unstructured cell-centered method based on a conservative pressure-based finite-volume method with interface capturing method(CICSAM) in a volume of fluid(VOF) scheme for phase interface capturing. The droplet transport mechanism is examined through numerical results that include velocity vectors, pressure contours, and total kinetic energy inside and around the droplet.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.39 no.11
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• pp.871-884
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• 2015

Fluid transport is a key issue in the development of microfluidic systems. Recently, Myong (2014) has proposed a new concept for droplet transport without external power sources, and numerically validated the results for a hypothetical 2D shape, initially having a hemicylindrical droplet shape. Myong and Kwon (2015) have also examined the transport mechanism for an actual water droplet, initially having a 3D hemispherical shape, on a horizontal hydrophilic/hydrophobic surface, based on the numerical results of the time evolution of the droplet shape, as well as the total kinetic, gravitational, pressure and surface free energies inside the droplet. In this study, a 3D numerical analysis of an initially spherical droplet is carried out to establish a new concept for droplet transport. Further, the transport mechanism of an actual water droplet is examined in detail from the viewpoint of the capillarity force imbalance through the numerical results of droplet shape and various energies inside the droplet.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.263-270
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• 2014

A fluid transport technique is a key issue for the development of microfluidic systems. In this paper, a new concept for transporting a droplet without external power sources is proposed and verified numerically. The proposed device is a heterogeneous surface which has both hydrophilic and hydrophobic horizontal surfaces. The numerical simulation to demonstrate the new concept is conducted by an in-house solution code (PowerCFD) which employs an unstructured cell-centered method based on a conservative pressure-based finite-volume method with interface capturing method (CICSAM) in a volume of fluid (VOF) scheme for phase interface capturing. It is found that the proposed concept for droplet transport shows superior performance for droplet transport in microfluidic systems.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.39 no.5
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• pp.405-414
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• 2015

Fluid transport is a key issue in the development of microfluidic systems. Recently, Myong (2014) has proposed a new concept for droplet transport without external power sources and numerically validated the results for a hypothetical 2D, initially having a hemicylindrical droplet. In this paper, the movement of an actual water droplet, initially having a 3D hemispherical shape, on horizontal hydrophilic/hydrophobic surfaces is simulated using a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package, Fluent, with VOF (volume of fluid) method. The results are compared with the 2D analysis of Myong (2014), and the transport mechanism for the actual water droplet is examined based on the numerical results of the time evolution of the droplet shape, as well as the total kinetic, gravitational, surface free and pressure energies inside the droplet.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.359-370
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• 2015

The present study aims to numerically investigate the behavior of liquid droplet driven by capillarity force imbalance on horizontal surfaces ranging from hydrophilic to hydrophobic, under various conditions. The droplet behavior has been simulated using an in-house solution code(PowerCFD), which employs an unstructured cell-centered method based on a conservative pressure-based finite-volume method with interface capturing method(CICSAM) in a volume of fluid(VOF) scheme for phase interface capturing. The detailed droplet behavior was obtained under various conditions for droplets with different initial shapes, contact angles and surface tension forces(or Bond number). The mechanism of droplet transport was examined using the numerical results on the droplet shapes.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.34 no.7
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• pp.671-677
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• 2010

In the present study, we designed a microfluidic platform for generating monodisperse droplets with diameters ranging from hundreds of nanometers to several micrometers. To generate fine droplets, T-junction and flow-focusing geometry are integrated into the microfluidic channel. Relatively large aqueous droplets are generated at the upstream T-junction and transported to the flow-focusing geometry, where each droplet is broken into smaller droplets of the desired size by the action of pressure and viscous stress. In this configuration, the flow rate of the inner fluid can be made very low, and the ratio of the inner- and outer-fluid flow rates in the flow-focusing region can be made very high. It has been shown that the present microfluidic device can generate droplets with diameters of approximately $1\;{\mu}m$ (standard deviation: <3%).

• Journal of ILASS-Korea
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.192-196
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• 2012

This paper reports on breakup characteristics of fuel droplet which includes metal nanoparticles. In order to develop a new injection system for nanoparticle-coated layers overcoming the conventional flame spray system, fundamental experiments were conducted to examine the interaction between a fuel droplet with nanoparticles and the external energy induced by the laser. In the experiments, this study used nickel nanoparticles whose size was under 100 nm to mix with kerosene as the fuel, and utilized a syringe pump and a metal needle to inject a fuel droplet. In particular, the Nd-YAG laser was adopted to give additional energy to the nanoparticles for evaporation of a fuel droplet containing nanoparticles. When the laser energy as 96 mJ was irradiated during the injection, it was observed that such an explosive evaporation occurred to break up a fuel droplet including nanoparticles, making the rapid increase in the ratio surface area to liquid volume. From this work, we suggest the possibility that the laser energy can be used for rapid evaporation of a fuel droplet.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.19-26
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• 2022

In droplet microfluidics, precise droplet manipulation is required in numerous applications. This study presents ultrasonic surface acoustic wave (USAW)-based microfluidic device for label-free droplet separation based on size. The proposed device is composed of a slanted-finger interdigital transducer on a piezoelectric substrate and a polydimethylsiloxane microchannel placed on the substrate. The microchannel is aligned in the cross-type configuration where the USAWs propagate in a perpendicular direction to the flow in the microchannel. When droplets are exposed to an acoustic field, they experience the USAW-induced acoustic radiation force (ARF), whose magnitude varies depending on the droplet size. We modeled the USAW-induced ARF based on ray acoustics and conducted a series of experiments to separate different-sized droplets. We found that the experimental results were in good agreement with the theoretical estimation. We believe that the proposed method will serve as a promising tool for size-based droplet separation in a label-free manner.

• Journal of Advanced Marine Engineering and Technology
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.201-205
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• 2015

This paper describes thermal flow characteristic in various pipelines: straight pipeline and curved pipeline. In the Arctic and ocean area, pipelines are exposed to a extremely low temperature ($0{\sim}-40^{\circ}C$). In this situation, three-dimensional flow analysis should be analyzed to investigate thermal effects such as pressure drop, temperature change, velocity deficit and distribution change of liquid droplet of internal fluid. Also, due to freezing of water droplet, impingement erosion is expected in the curved pipeline. The stability of the pipelines can be influenced by impingement erosion. In this paper, multi-phase and multi-species analysis was introduced to analyze the flow characteristics and impingement erosion of Arctic and ocean pipelines.

• Journal of the Korean Electrochemical Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.39-45
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• 2013

The water management is one of the key issues in low operating temperature proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). The gas diffusion layer (GDL) allows the reactant gases flow to the reaction sites of the catalyst layer (CL). At high current density, generated water forms droplets because the normal operating temperature is $60{\sim}80^{\circ}C$. If liquid water is not evacuated properly, the pores in the GDL will be blocked and the performance will be reduced severely. In this study, the microchannel GDL was proposed to solve the flooding problem. The liquid water transport through 3-D constructed conventional GDL and microchannel GDL was analyzed varying air velocity, water velocity, and contact angle. The simulation results showed that the liquid water was evacuated rapidly through the microchannel GDL because of the lower flow resistance. Therefore, the microchannel GDL was efficient to remove liquid water in the GDL and gas channels.