The Influence of Microstructure on the Flow Dynamics in Straight Microchannels

The paper is dedicated to the experimental and numerical investigations of the flow around cylinders inside a microchannel with cross section 500 × 100 μm. The study analyses the influence of Reynolds number on the flow spectrum downstream the cylinders. Qualitative and quantitative visualizations of the flow and the velocity distributions using μPIV technique are obtained around one cylinder. The numerics performed with the ANSYS Fluent code for the cylinder diameter 200 μm are validated by the experiments. The flow patterns and the vortices downstream one cylinder and 3 cylinders (positioning transversally and longitudinally on the flow direction) are numerically investigated.