Flow-driven microfluidic mixer

Rapid fluid mixing in microchannels has been a perennial quest in microfluidics for over 30 years. In this work, I designed and fabricated an ultrafast MEMS-based mixer predicated on a rotating turbine. I used computational fluid dynamics simulations to optimize the performance of the mixer, achieving turbine speeds up to 30k rpm and mixing durations less than 50 μs .

I used photolithographic techniques with a two-level deep reactive-ion etch to define the top rotor, rotor vanes, and microchannels, with a bottom reactive-ion etch to release the rotor. The mixer is well suited for any application requiring high speed fluidic mixing but is ideally suited to the study and control of fast sequential chemical reactions or the synthesis of kinetically controlled, metastable compounds.