화학공학소재연구정보센터
International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Vol.126, 1299-1315, 2018
Topology optimization of electrode patterns for electroosmotic micromixer
In confined microfluidic spaces such as microchannels, electroosmosis is a convenient Coulomb-force mechanism used to electrically actuate charged particles and ions presented in the fluid and pump the electrolytic fluid itself through drag forces. The shape and position of electrode pairs, whose induced charges are in contact with the fluid, determine the electric field and hence the resulting fluid-dynamic velocity distribution. In this paper, we address the inverse design of the electrode-pair patterns in such actuation mechanisms. Our approach is to use topology optimization to inversely determine the patterns of an electrode pair. The optimization procedure requires a mathematical description of the desired fluid behaviour, and then drives the patterns of the electrode pairs to achieve the goal performance. We demonstrate the behaviour of the procedure, which couples the Navier-Stokes equations with charge transportation, to implement an efficient electroosmotic micromixer for laminar microflow. We show that the procedure allows to investigate such microflows under the influence of selected parameter variations, thereby exploring the design space towards optimal device performance. This developed method is novel on the topology optimization of a surface structure to control bulk performance and its implementation over a lower-dimensional surface of an otherwise volumetric domain, where the material interpolation is implemented between Dirichlet and Newmann types of boundary conditions. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.