A NUMERICAL STUDY OF UNSTEADY LAMINAR FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER THROUGH AN ARRAY OF ROTATING RECTANGULAR MICROCHANNELS

摘要

Centrifugal microfluidics plays an important role for enabling many novel applications in life sciences. By controlling the rotating frequency, fluids can be handled and controlled without any actual pumps, actuators or active valves, resulting in cost effective and miniaturized techniques for fluid transport, valving, metering, switching, splitting and separation of fluids. In order to get a vivid picture of the underlying physics of centrifugal microfluidics, we have modeled and simulated fluid flow and heat transfer for water flowing through an array of rotating rectangular microchannels. A finite volume technique based on semi implicit pressure based equation (SIMPLE) algorithm has been developed to solve the Naiver-Stokes equations for unsteady laminar flow. The energy equation has been solved by applying repeated thermal boundary conditions at the wall in cross stream direction. The simulations show significant deviation of velocity and temperature profiles for rotating flow than those of non-rotating case. The results are presented for different flow Reynolds number and rotational Reynolds number.