• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.28 no.12
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• pp.1549-1556
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• 2004

We have deigned, fabricated and compared four different types of static chaos microfluid mixers, including the mixers using straight channel flow, microblock-induced alternating whirl flow, microchannel-induced lamination flow, and combined alternating whirl-lamination flow. Among them, the alternating whirl-lamination (AWL-type) mixer, composed of 3-D rotationally arranged microblocks and dividing microchannels fabricated by conventional planar lithography process, is effective to reduce the mixing length over wide flow rate ranges. We characterize the performance of the fabricated mixers, through the flow visualization technique using phenolphthalein solution. We verify that the AWL-type microfluid mixer shows the shortest fluid mixing length of 2.8mm∼5.8mm for the flow rate range of Re=0.26∼26 with the pressure drop lower than 5kPa. Compared to the previous mixers, requiring the mixing lengths of 7∼17mm, the AWL-type microfluid mixer results in the 60% reduction of the mixing lengths. Due to the reduced mixing lengths within reasonable pressure drop ranges, the present micromixers have potentials for use in the miniaturized Micro-Total-Analysis-Systems($\mu$TAS).