Development of a New Micromixer “Elis” for Fluid Mixing and Organic Reactions in Millidevices
Harrson Silva Santana, João L. Silva, Adriano G. P. da Silva, Alan Rodrigues, Rodrigo de Lima Amaral, Dirceu Noriler, Osvaldir Pereira Taranto
Abstract
An efficient fluid mixing performance was achieved at the micro- and milliscale by a new design "Elis" in a wide range of Reynolds numbers. The micromixer is composed of internal walls and circular obstacles inducing three mass-transfer mechanisms: reduction of the diffusion path; change of the flow direction/vortex generation, and split and recombination of streams. The design was proposed and optimized by numerical simulations, allowing its application as micro- or millidevices. The device performance was numerically assessed by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in the mixing process of two systems (vegetable oil/ethanol, and water/ethanol) for a Reynolds number range of 0.01–100 and also in the biodiesel synthesis for a residence time range of 10–180 s. High mixing indexes (M = 0.985) were observed for the oil/ethanol system at low Reynolds numbers of 0.01 and 10. The CFD predictions for oil conversion were 91.32% (height of 1000 μm) and 92.22% (height of 2000 μm) for a residence time of 30 s. For the water/ethanol system, higher mixing indexes were 0.93 at Re = 1, increasing to a maximum of 0.99 at Re = 50 and 100. The numerical results demonstrated good performance of Elis as a millidevice, providing mixing efficiencies similar or even higher than microdevices from the literature.