Numerical Analysis of Fluid Flow in Rotating Micro-channels

• Tech Stack: MATLAB, C++, GNUPlot, Ansys Fluent
• Github URL: Project Link

Fluid flow investigation in rotating micro-channels is a pivotal area of study in centrifugal microfluidics, which has also recently emerged as an important technique in chemical separations and biomedical applications. The rotation brings in the coriolis force and centrifugal force which goes on to affect the flow pattern in a rotating micro-channel significantly compared to a non rotating channel. Effective control of mixing and flow pattern within a centrifugal microfluidic device is an important aspect of its design and in this work, a comprehensive numerical study of the flow pattern in a rotating micro-channel was done along with the development of the flow.

A pressure based finite volume technique with a collocated grid was used to solve the Navier Stokes equations in a non-inertial frame using C++. SIMPLE algorithm was implemented for pressure velocity coupling and the Rhie-Chow interpolation scheme was used to implement the algorithm on the non-staggered grid. The discretised linear equations were solved using the CGSTAB solver till convergence was achieved. The code implemented was further validated by implementing the flow for a non-rotating pipe and comparing the results with the analytical results. The validated code was then used to do the numerical study for a micro-channel with rotation and the resulting data points of the grid were plotted using MATLAB and GNUplot.