Reduced order modeling of thermal effects in droplet microreactors

This paper presents a novel reduced order model aimed for simulating thermal and enzymatic processes in microfluidic environments. The modeling method has been worked out for a special two phase flow, the Taylor-flow, which is widely used in microfluidics. Using the Taylor-flow is needed, if separated microreactors are required realized by an equidistant alternating sequence of the liquid phases. The reduced order model handles the diffusive heat transfer (conduction) as well as the enzymatic reaction described by the Michaelis-Menten approach. The reduced order model contains the main features of the Taylor-flow such as microcirculation and back flow. These are necessary to achieve an accurate description of the convective heat and mass transfer. The model has been validated by a standard CFD simulation. The results show that the error is near 12 %. The accuracy was tested for a wide range of Reynolds numbers. With this novel approach the temperature profile on the channel wall can be calculated in a few hours compared to conventional numerical techniques which would require weeks.