A Novel Sintered Porous Micromixer for the Effective Mixing of Biologics and Scale Model Investigation of Micromixing Mechanisms

This paper presents a parametric investigation of a porous 3D micro-mixer as well as a 10:1 scale model of the same used to examine the influence of the contributions of both diffusion and advection to successful mixing of fluids of different viscosity. Experiments at both scales implement the laser induced fluorescence technique to capture the evolution of concentration gradients at the mixer outlet. Mixing performance strongly increases with flow rate in the micromixing apparatus but only moderately in the scale-up suggesting important scale-dependent manipulation of diffusion.