Fluid Micromixing Technology and Its Applications for Biological and Chemical Processes

In recent years, there have been intensive investigations on various microfluidic devices and integrated microfluidic systems, such as lab-on-a-chips (or micro total analysis system—

μ

-TAS) and microreactors. They have been increasingly applied for the biological and medical processes such as genetic analysis, disease diagnosis, chemical synthesis, etc. One involved problem is to mix fluids at microscopic scales. Due to the reduced feature size, the micro flow is usually viscosity dominant laminar flow, and the fluid mixing is limited to diffusion. However, in many applications, the fluid mixing is of crucial importance. The mixing efficiency may directly affect the performance of the whole system. In this paper, the techniques to enhance fluid micromixing are reviewed. A brief introduction of their applications for various biological and medical processes is also presented.