Institude of Integrated Mircosystems Funded Project

Project Title:

Fabrication and Characterization of Micromixers

Principal Investigator:

Prof. Yi-Kuen LEE, Department of Mechanical Engineering, HKUST

Project Duration:

Jul 1, 2002 to Jun 30, 2004

Project Summary:

Micromixers are one of the key components in micro Total Analysis System. Since turbulence is difficult to generate for mixing in micro scale, there are many different kinds of micromixers fabricated by MEMS technology in recent years. Much research has only focused on the fabrication of different micromixers. However, few have addressed on how to develop an appropriate mixing index for fair comparison of micromixers and on their chaotic structure. This project made substantial progress on the modeling of a micromixer and the parametric study of the micro mixer, which has published in J. Micromech. & Microeng. 2003, using Lyapunov exponent analysis and Poincare section. Based on this comprehensive analysis, the mixers for various biofluids can be properly designed.

In view that the traditional methods are computationally expensive, we constructed a consistent method based on Finite Time Lyapunov Exponent which can save CPU time by three orders of magnitude. The result using our new method has shown good agreement with that from traditional methods and computational fluid mechanics.

Research Output:

  1. Publication
    2.

  2. Student trained


    • Winky Lap Wing Hau, completed the Ph.D thesis in January 2005, Thesis title ¡§Electrokinetically-driven Liquid Flows in Microchannels Using Surface-chemistry Technology¡¨

Back to project list