Microfluidic separation process by the Soret effect in biological fluids

In this article the thermophysical and transport properties of mixtures composed of glucose and sucrose in dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) are determined. The studied mass concentrations are 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25% of glucose or sucrose in DMSO at an average temperature of 25 °C. The properties studied experimentally are the dynamic viscosity, density, mass and thermal expansion coefficient and thermodiffusion coefficient. The thermogravitational technique in flat configuration is used in order to obtain the thermodiffusion coefficients. Once these properties are known, the work is focused on the numerical study of applying a temperature gradient in microdevices in order to optimize the extraction of DMSO using the CFD Ansys Fluent software. The results show an improvement even of 35% on microfluidic separation techniques that are based on a purely diffusive regime.