simulation and fabrication of proposed microfluidic chips using glass

Microfluidics has a wide range of applications in various fields, especially experimental sciences, chemical industries, microelectronics and pharmaceuticals. given flow chemistry's advantages over traditional batch approach and wide applications, continuous-flow approaches using microreactors and other microfluidic devices have gained significant attention in recent years from academia and industries. this research studied the design and simulation of the proposed micromixers and microreactors using computational fluid dynamics (cfd) and comsol multiphysics software. during the simulations, transport of dilute species and laminar flow physics were applied, with water used as the operational fluid, entering the microchannels with two different concentrations. additionally, the mixing index was used as the objective function to quantitatively compare the performance of the microchips, which were calculated at four residence time levels: 20, 30, 40, and 100 minutes for each design. based on the simulation results, microreactor 1 demonstrated a significantly better mixing index compared to microreactor 2, with its mixing index reaching 92.6% and 99.8% at residence times of 40 and 100 minutes, respectively. following, microchips that indicated better performance were selected for the fabrication process using glass and co2 laser engraving technique. after that, a leakage test was performed to ensure the appropriate fabrication method. finally, an experimental mixing test was performed on the fabricated micromixer to show the good agreement between experimental and simulation outcomes.