Effect of Wetted Microtexturing on Friction in Microchannel Flow

Abstract

Microchannel flows are widely used in applications where small diffusion length scales are important. However, their inherent dimensional constrain also translates into high pumping power requirements. Inspired by nature, one possible method to reduce the large viscous pressure losses is to introduce textures in a microchannel. Depending on the interaction between the textured surface and the liquid, the microstructures can either be wetted or nonwetted. Less adhesion between solid and liquid in nonwetted state has made it popular in most of the friction reduction studies. However, in the nonwetted state, preventing liquid from penetrating into the grooves under pressurized conditions and the gas-liquid interface acting like a solid boundary open space to consider the wetted state for friction reduction as well. When dealing with the wetted state we should be aware that penetration of the flow inside the grooves can induce the pressure drag alongside the skin drag. Therefore, the wetted state will lead to a trade-off between skin and pressure drag. The aim of this work is to understand how different microtextures affect the total drag in a laminar microchannel flow. Textured microchannels with width-to-depth aspect ratios of 1, 10 and 50 and different width of the land region have been tested. In order to perform correct comparisons, the textured and baseline microchannels are designed to have the same volume. The results show that increasing the aspect ratio of the trenches introduces an extermum point in the hydraulic resistance of the microchannels. The optimum aspect ratio for the tested microchannels is 10, in which the trenches are not wide enough for streamlines to bend inside the trenches and increase the skin drag and they are not highly dense along the microchannel to reveal the negative effect of the pressure drag. On the whole, the hydraulic resistance of the textured channels is higher than the equivalent baseline for all the tested geometries.