Numerical investigation of near-critical fluid convective flow mixing in microchannels

Supercritical CO₂ fluid has been widely used in chemical extraction, chemical synthesis, micro-manufacturing and heat transfer apparatus, and so forth. The current study deals with near-critical CO₂ microchannel mixing flow and its basic characteristics. Careful numerical investigations are carried out by solving the coupled computational fluid dynamic equations. The results show that strong near-critical vortex flows can be achieved in a relatively wide range of initial and controlling conditions in microchannels. Basic, isothermally developed flows are simulated and then used as the initial state for a heat convective simulation. After the wall heat flux is applied, the vortex mixing flow originates from the hot boundaries in microchannels with height D=100μm to 200μm, while natural convection will gradually become dominant for microchannels with D=300μm to 500μm. The current micro-mixing evolution can be ascribed to a novel type of Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Well-correlated characteristic numbers are identified for the effective near-critical microchannel mixing cases. The vortex growth and evolution mode in microchannels are found to differ greatly from previous micro-mixing methods. Possible applications in micro-engineering/chemical process are also discussed in this study.