Numerical evaluation of two-fluid mixing in a swirl micro-mixer*

A collaborative investigation of two-fluid mixing in a swirl micro-mixer was carried out by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Tokyo Denki University. Pure water and a mixture of glycerol and water were separately injected into branch channels and they were subsequently mixed in the central chamber. The two-fluid flow pattern was numerically modeled, in which the dependence of the mixture viscosity and density on the mass fraction of glycerol in the mixing fluid was carefully taken into consideration. The mixing performance of the two fluids was evaluated by varying the Reynolds numbers and the mass fractions of glycerol in water. The mixing process was extensively analyzed using streamline maps and contour plotting distributions of pressure and glycerol concentration. The numerical results show that the acceptable uniformity of mixing at Re= 0.1 is primarily attributed to the time-consuming molecular diffusion, whereas the cost-effective mixing at Re> 500 was obtained because of the generation of the swirling flow. The increasing mass fraction of glycerol in water was found to attenuate the mixing performance. The preliminary microscopic visualization of the two-fluid mixing at Re=1300 demonstrated the consistence with the numerical results.