Mixing in superhydrophobic biomimetic rose petal passive microchannel

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that biomimetic superhydrophobic rose petal microchannel surfaces significantly enhance mixing efficiency in microfluidic devices by leveraging anisotropic drag reduction, outperforming traditional chaotic mixers.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simple, inexpensive soft lithographic method to create biomimetic rose petal surfaces that improve microchannel mixing by exploiting natural slip and no-slip boundary conditions.

Findings

Positive replica channels increase mixing index by up to 77.2%.

Mixing enhancement correlates with Peclet number and wetting behavior.

Biomimetic surfaces outperform traditional chaotic mixers in mixing efficiency.

Abstract

Laminar flow prevails in microfluidic channels, and mixing is limited by the slow diffusive process at the interface between the mixing liquids. Whitesides and co-workers demonstrated a chaotic mixer by patterning the floor of the microchannel with obliquely oriented microridges. This creates an anisotropic resistance to flow, inducing exponential increase in stretching and folding of fluid elements leading to a dramatic increase in mixing. Rose petals that have micro papillae decorated with nanofolds, present a unique biomimetic, superhydrophobic, super adhesive surface. In the present work, a positive and negative replica of the rose petal surface was created using a simple, inexpensive soft lithographic technique and these replicas formed the floor of the microchannel. The floor of the channel naturally presents alternating slip and no slip boundary conditions for the fluid flow that in turn provides anisotropic drag reduction. We find that mixing index obtained for positive replica floor channel is distinctly higher than that of a negative replica floor channel. The variation in mixing index with Peclet number for the replicated channels are explained by characterizing their wetting behavior using contact angle and confocal microscopy. The enhancement in mixing due to the patterning of the floor is quantified by calculating the percentage change in mixing in the replicated channels from the corresponding simple Y channel values. The maximum percentage change is obtained for the positive replica floor channel (77.2 %) and compares well with chaotic mixer having obliquely oriented ridges on the floor (74.7 %).