Viscous streaming-enhanced inertial particle transport

Abstract

Fluidic devices operating at the micro- and milli-meter scales employ several fundamental tasks involving pumping, mixing, separation, sorting, storing and transport of different fluids (or) species. An attractive fluid mechanism that can be leveraged to fulfill these wide range of tasks is viscous streaming, a non-linear effect characteristic of the scales above. In this thesis, we first show that numerical simulations based on the Remeshed Vortex Method (RVM) can accurately and efficiently capture viscous streaming dynamics. We test this algorithm on a wide variety of settings while simultaneously exhibiting the resultant streaming flow--structures, demonstrating both streaming's capability of effecting flow control and our solver's robustness in capturing these structures. We then consider the problem of an idealized two-dimensional inertial particle transport and prove that transport can be augmented by sensibly utilizing the streaming mechanism. We then successfully perform a forward--design study to devise shapes capable of enhanced transport using this mechanism, capitalizing on the insights gained from our demonstrations above. We envison such transport applications in the emergent technology of miniature robots, capable of traversing our blood stream to deliver payloads of therapeutical drugs.LimitedAuthor requested closed access (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD syste