A novel 3D porous micromixer fabricated using selective ultrasonic foaming

This paper presents a novel 3D porous micromixer fabricated using a selective ultrasonic foaming technique. The 3D porous structure can split, stretch, fold and break the mixing flows effectively and thus dramatically improves the mixing efficiency of microfluidic flows. In the paper, we report on the fabrication and performance of the 3D porous micromixer. The effects of flow rate, mixing length and pore size were studied using flow visualization experiments. It is shown that the proposed micromixer performs very well for flows with a wide range of Reynolds numbers. Sufficient mixing results can be achieved with a short mixing length for flows with Reynolds numbers as low as 0.1.