Design and Fabrication of a Three Dimensional Spiral Micromixer

In this work, we present a three dimensional micromixer which consists of two layers of spiral channels overlapped together in the vertical direction. This micromixer is designed by using a smooth channel twisted into double‐layer spiral geometry with simple topological structure. Based on the principle of Dean effects, this kind of structure is beneficial to produce, enhance and sustain the Dean vortices, which can perturb the laminar fluid effectively. In order to improve the mixing performance, the detailed parameters have been optimized by using the computational fluid dynamics software. The results indicate that the erect channel which is connected with the two layers of spiral channels plays a critical role for well mixing. Meanwhile, the effect of mixing has been identified in a fabricated glass‐micromixer. The mixing ef?ciency of 90% has been achieved by optimizing the flow rate and the structure of the erect channel. Thus, this micromixer has manifested high mixing efficiency and presents good practicability in the versatile microfluidic systems.