Modeling and analysis of bump effect on capillary flow through microchannels

In this study, the filling process of fluid flow through microchannels is investigated. The flow region is fully arranged with obstacles such as bumps. A systematic approach, called response surface methodology (RSM), has been adopted to effectively develop a statistical model relating the filling time to the effectively designed parameters such as bump diameter, bump pitch and bump height. The filling process is conducted under the action of capillary force only. Results show that the most influential factor on the filling time of microchannel flow is the bump height, followed by the bump pitch and bump diameter. Besides, the filling time increases significantly as the flow front of fluids advanced from the inlet. Moreover, the values obtained from the proposed model also show good agreement with those of simulated experiments. Meanwhile, the total error of filling time between the predictive values and experiments is less than 0.2%.