Design and Analysis of Micromixers on a Centrifugal Platform

This work reports a novel mixing design that can do fast, batch-typed liquid mixing on a centrifugal platform. Mixing is an important procedure for many applications related to chemical reactors and biological assays, especially in the field of microfluidics. The extremely small sizes of microchannels make it difficult to achieve turbulence to assist mixing. To overcome this problem, a meandering fluidic design on the centrifugal platform is proposed. Centrifual force promotes mixing by inducing lateral flow movement in the circular section and flow focusing effect in the bending section. The degree of mixing was studied for solutions with various viscosities under different rotational speeds. The experimental results showed that this mixer can mix microliter or nanoliter volumes of aqueous solutions within one second.