振動誘起流れを用いたマイクロミキサーのPIVによる性能評価

抄録

In recent years, various micromixers have been reported. However, conventional constant flow-based methods have undesirable dead volume about 10-100 μL in tube connection parts between microfluidic chips and external pumps. Thus, conventional methods are not suitable for mixing of rare samples, such as antibodies, proteins or exosomes. To solve this problem, we propose micromixer based on vibration-induced flow. Vibration-induced flow is the localized flow which is induced around a vibrating microstructure by being applied high-speed vibration to the structure. By using this proposed method, dead volume which exists in tube connection parts of conventional micromixers can be omitted. In this study, we fabricated two types of micromixers having micropillar array with hexagonal configuration or matrix configuration. Then, we quantitatively evaluated mixing performances of proposed micromixers by calculating variance of distance between microparticles and observing flow distribution and vorticity with PIV.