In microfluidics mixing of different fluids is a highly non-trivial task to the absence of turbulence. The dominant process allowing mixing at low number is therefore diffusion, thus rendering mixing in plain channels inefficient. Recently, passive chaotic micromixers such as the staggered herringbone were developed, allowing efficient mixing of fluids by repeated and folding of the fluid interfaces. The optimization of the geometrical of such mixer devices is often performed by time consuming and expensive and error experiments. We demonstrate that the application of the lattice method to fluid flow in highly complex mixer geometries together with techniques from statistical physics and dynamical systems theory can lead a highly efficient way to optimize micromixer geometries. The strategy applies parallel fluid flow simulations inside a mixer, where massless and noninteracting particles are introduced. By following their trajectories we can finite time Lyapunov exponents in order to quantify the degree of chaotic inside the mixer. The current report provides a review of our results published [1] together with additional details on the simulation methodology.
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Yunis et al. (2008) studied this question.