Micromixer based on vibration-induced flow

Abstract

In recent years, various micromixers have been reported. However, conventional constant flow-based methods have undesirable dead volume in the order of 10 μL in tube connection parts between microfluidic chips and external pumps. Thus, conventional methods are not suitable for mixing of rare samples, such as fluorescent reagents or antibodies. To solve this problem, we propose micromixer based on vibration-induced flow. Vibration-induced flow is the localized flow around a microstructure which is induced by applying high-speed vibration to the structure. By using proposed method, dead volume which exists in tube connection parts of conventional micromixers can be omitted. In this study, we employed micropillar array with hexagonal configuration and evaluated its design parameters. Design parameters are diameter of micropillar D and pitch of micropillar P . We varied P as 180, 200 and 270 μm and succeeded in fluid mixing with approximately 50 % of mixing efficiency with P=200 μm.