Development Of A New Micromixer "Elis" For Fluid Mixing And Organic Reactions In Millidevices

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 10180 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 mu m) and 92.22% (height of 2000 mu m) 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.