Mixing Performance of Toroidal Ring Mixers: Effects of Flow Rate Ratios and Geometric Asymmetry

Abstract

Microfluidic mixing is important for nanoparticle fabrication, where rapid contact between the solvent and nonsolvent streams is needed to control the formation process. Various micromixer geometries have been developed and analyzed to improve mixing efficiency. However, for toroidal micromixers, the role of flow rate ratio and geometric asymmetry has not been examined in detail. In this study, the mixing process of two toroidal micromixer designs is investigated, namely symmetric and asymmetric, with emphasis on the impact of flow rate ratio and geometric asymmetry during the mixing of miscible fluids. Numerical simulations are carried out to examine the mixing behavior of these toroidal micromixers for different flow rates and flow rate ratios. High-fidelity numerical simulations are performed using the stabilized finite element method. The concentration and velocity fields are used to examine how the chamber asymmetry can affect the mixing performance. Experiments are also conducted to provide a validation for the numerical results. We demonstrate that the asymmetric toroidal mixer design generally improves the mixing over the conventional design, especially at low to moderate total flow rates. The results obtained show that improved mixing can be achieved without changing the overall mixer size.