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Abstract
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Since the majority of fluids in engineering and
biology applications are non-Newtonian, a numerical investigation
was performed on the mixing of non-Newtonian
fluids. Chaotic advection is one of the useful mechanisms
to enhance the mixing performance which can be generated
using curved micromixers. Therefore, mixing of nonNewtonian
fluids in curved micromixers was studied in
this study. The power-law fluids with power-law indices
between 0.49 and 1 and Reynolds numbers between 0.1 and
300 were investigated. Open source CFD code of OpenFOAM
was utilized to simulate mixing process in micromixers.
The results showed that the mixing index decreases
and dimensionless pressure drop increases by decreasing the
power-law index. The chaotic advection and mixing index
increase by increasing the Reynolds number for all values of
power-law index. In addition, micromixers with sharp turns
in their geometries yielded efficient mixing performance for
low power-law indices and low Reynolds numbers.
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