A Novel Strategy for Square-Wave Micromixers: A Survey of RBC Lysis for Further Biological Analysis

Most biorelated applications require homogeneous mixing, necessitating innovative approaches to design high-efficiency micromixers. In this study, for the first time, we have changed the straight structure of a base square-wave micromixer to include regular-polygon-designed mixing units coupled with convergent-divergent channels. The aim was to show that the designed mixing units can enhance mixing at low Reynolds (Re) numbers. Importantly, within the optimization process, the mixing volume and mixing length of the micromixers were kept intact. In this respect, the required numerical evaluations were conducted to obtain the optimized micromixers at Re = 0.1 and 2, where the mixing index for the base micromixer increased from 0.9187 to 0.9944 and from 0.1600 to 0.4043, respectively. Finally, to prove that the optimized micromixers possess a better practical performance than the base micromixer, RBC lysis, as a vital preprocessing step of many biological experiments, was compared at Re = 0.1 and 2 for the base and optimized micromixers.

Automated summary

This study demonstrates the potential of improving mixing efficiency at low Reynolds numbers through the design of innovative micromixers. The optimized micromixers show better performance than the base micromixer in practical applications.