Numerical Study and Comparison of Passive Mixing in Helical Micromixers

Open Access

Year : 2023 | Volume :10 | : 1 | Page : 76-92
By

    Akash Sinha

  1. M. Zunaid

  2. Afzal Husain

  1. Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Delhi Technological University, Delhi, India
  2. Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman

Abstract

A passive mixing inside three micromixers has been studied with water as the mixing fluid. Since the mixing at the micro-level is governed by species diffusion hence it is a time-consuming process that requires an extended length of micromixer for the required amount of mixing. The present study tackles this problem by introducing two helical micromixers, a Three-dimensional helical micromixer (TDHM), and TDHM having four inlets (TDHM-FO). These micromixers need a reduced length of mixing channel while still providing greater efficiency than a simple T-micromixer (STM). A detailed analysis is being presented to analyse the mixing process and performance. Several other parameters have been calculated and presented in this study along with the efficacious Reynolds number. Both the helical micromixers performed better than simple T-micromixer for all values of Reynolds numbers. For low Reynolds numbers (Re≤75), TDHM-FO is better. TDHM provides the best results for Re=310 and 400 which is even better than TDHM-FO and the mixing efficiency for TDHM and TDHM-FO is much better than STM for all ranges of Reynolds numbers. It is concluded that both the
helical micromixers provide much better efficiency that too with less mixing length compared to STM. While examining a fluid flow, pressure drop becomes an important parameter to study because it indicates about the amount of energy required to make the fluid flow. Higher the mixing, higher will be the pressure drop and hence more pumping power is needed to drive the flow. Among all three
micromixers, STM showed the least value of pressure drop while TDHM-FO showed the highest.

Keywords: Helical passive micromixer, STM, numerical analysis, Newtonian fluid water, mixing index (MI), pressure drop

This article belongs to Conference RAMMTE-2022: Recent Advances in Materials, Manufacturing and Thermal Engineering

How to cite this article: Akash Sinha, M. Zunaid, Afzal Husain.Numerical Study and Comparison of Passive Mixing in Helical Micromixers.Journal of Polymer and Composites.2023; 10(1):76-92.
How to cite this URL: Akash Sinha, M. Zunaid, Afzal Husain , Numerical Study and Comparison of Passive Mixing in Helical Micromixers jopc 2023 {cited 2023 Jan 19};10:76-92. Available from: https://journals.stmjournals.com/jopc/article=2023/view=95110

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Conference Open Access Original Research
Volume 10
1
Received August 27, 2022
Accepted November 24, 2022
Published January 19, 2023
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