Over 200,000 Americans have peripheral nerve injuries annually that result in a loss of function and a compromised quality of life. Of these, a significant percent involves unsuccessful repair of peripheral nerve gaps that occur due to traumatic limb injury or collateral damage to peripheral nerves during tumor resection. The clinical gold standard to repair a nerve gap is to use sural nerve au...

A confined liquid thread can form monodisperse droplets near the exit of a microchannel, provided the continuous phase is able to enter the microchannel. A general model that accurately predicts the droplet size including the breakup position inside the microchannel is presented and is verified with experimental observations; breakup occurs as long as the capillary number (Ca) of the liquid thr...

A microchannel with two inlets and two outlets was tested as a potential reactor to carry out two-phase catalytic phase transfer reaction with phase separation at the exit of the microchannel. The catalytic phase transfer reaction between benzyl chloride and sodium sulfide was chosen as a model reaction. The effect of operational time on the conversion was studied. By utilizing a multiphase par...

The entropy generation due to steady laminar forced convection fluid flow through parallel plates microchannel is investigated numerically. The effect of Knudsen, Reynolds, Prandtl, Eckert numbers and the nondimensional temperature difference on entropy generation within the microchannel is discussed. The fraction of the entropy generation due to heat transfer to the total entropy generation wi...

In this paper, thermal mixing characteristics of two miscible fluids in a T-shaped microchannel are investigated theoretically, experimentally, and numerically. Thermal mixing processes in a T-shaped microchannel are divided into two zones, consisting of a T-junction and a mixing channel. An analytical two-dimensional model was first built to describe the heat transfer processes in the mixing c...

Vapor-venting microchannel heat exchangers are promising because they address the problems of high pressure drop, flow instability, and local dryout that are common in conventional two-phase microchannel heat sinks. We present a 3D numerical simulation of the vapor-venting process in a rectangular microchannel bounded on one side by a hydrophobic porous membrane for phase-separation. The simula...

This study presents the numerical simulation of three-dimensional incompressible steady and laminar fluid flow and conjugate heat transfer of a trapezoidal microchannel heat sink using water as a cooling fluid in a silicon substrate. Navier-Stokes equations with conjugate energy equation are discretized by finite-volume method. We perform numerical computations for a range of 50 Re 600, 0.05W ...

A microfluidic manifold has been designed, fabricated, and tested which hydrodynamically focuses a sample into the center of a microchannel and provides control over the vertical position of the focused sample via the flow-rates of the focusing fluids [1]. To characterize the focusing action, a mixing experiment was performed in which the sample fluid and focusing fluid contained spectrally uni...

We succeeded in fabrication of a free accessible microchannel using an air-liquid interface. To pattern the air-liquid interface in the microfluidic chip, we utilized nano-geometric surface which encloses micropatterned massive nanopillars to enhance the wettability of the surface, which was fabricated by using the hybrid mask lithography technique. Novelties of this paper are shown as follows....

Fast solute mixing can be achieved in a microchannel by rapid unidirectional displacement of a discrete liquid drop. The recirculation streamlines created within the liquid during the drop’s motion cause the solute to interlayer across the channel depth, provided the interlayer diffusion of the solute is small. Uniform interlayering appears when the drop is displaced by more than three drop len...