Numerical and Experimental Studies of a Capillary Channel

M. Xu[1], Z. Wu[1], X. Wang[1]
[1]Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Published in 2014

Capillary effects are common in microfluidics due to large surface-to-volume ratio of flows inside microchannels. In biological or chemical analysis, capillary flow is used for the transport of liquid and mixing enhancement, without applying any external means. It’s used in biochemical analysis, drug delivery, and protein crystallization, where minute amount of liquids are precisely guided towards targeted reservoir. In this work, we design a capillary channel for transporting methanol in fuel cell, and investigate its performance both numerically and experimentally.

A computational fluid dynamics simulation was carried out with COMSOL Multiphysics® software, using the Two-Phase Flow, Laminar, Phase Field application mode in the MEMS Module, to study capillary filling process in the micro channel.

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