External Field Induced Flow Patterns in Microscale Multiphase Flows

D. Bandyopadhyay[1], A. Sharma[1], S. Timung[1], V. Tiwari[1], T. K. Mandal[1]
[1]Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, Assam, India
Publié en 2013

The study of multiphase flows inside the microfluidic devices has received much attention recently because of its applications in heat and mass transfer, mixing, microreaction, emulsification and most importantly in MEMS and lab-on-a-chip. We study the influence of an electric field on the interfacial morphologies and their transitions, the phenomenon termed electrohydrodynamics. The literature survey suggests that a host of interesting flow patterns can be achieved by controlling the fluid properties (interfacial tension, viscosity) and flow conditions (flow rate). We observed that when the electric field is enforced on an oil-water two-phase multiphase configuration, the interfaces can deform into some very unique patterns, that are generally not observed in the pressure driven two-phase flows.