How the ultrasonic parameters affect the mixing performance of a microfluidic mixer based on acoustically driven microbubbles

In recent years, microfluidic technology has been widely used in chemical sample analysis, biomedical diagnosis, cell count and other fields. As one of the main applications of microfluidic system, the research of micromixer has been developing rapidly, especially for acoustic microfluidic mixers as its high mixing efficiency and low cost. In order to improve the performance, the acoustic microfluidics based on bubble microflow which is the main mechanism of mixing has attracted much attention of researchers, but it has not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, based on the finite element simulation results, a microfluidic mixer based on acoustically driven sidewall-trapped microbubbles was designed and fabricated, a method to quantify the performance of the mixer was proposed, the influence of the flow speed on the mixing performance were investigated, and then different intensity and frequency of the driving ultrasound were applied to analyze the effect mechanisms of the ultrasonic parameters on the bubbles microflow based mixer.