Flow near the meniscus of a pressure-driven water slug in microchannels

Abstract

Micro-PIV system with a high speed CCD camera is used to measure the flow field near the advancing meniscus of a water slug in microchannels. Image shifting technique combined with meniscus detecting technique is proposed to measure the relative velocity of the liquid near the meniscus in a moving reference frame. The proposed method is applied to an advancing front of a slug in microchannels with rectangular cross section. In the case of hydrophilic channel, strong flow from the center to the side wall along the meniscus occurs, while in the case of the hydrophobic channel, the fluid flows in the opposite direction. Further, the velocity near the side wall is higher than the center region velocity, exhibiting the characteristics of a strong shear-driven flow. This phenomenon is explained to be due to the existence of small gaps between the slug and the channel wall at each capillary corner so that the gas flows through the gaps inducing high shear on the slug surface. Simulation of the shape of a static droplet inside a cubic cell obtained by using the Surface Evolver program is supportive of the existence of the gap at the rectangular capillary corners. The flow fields in the circular capillary, in which no such gap exists, are also measured. The results show that a similar flow pattern to that of the hydrophilic rectangular capillary (i.e., center-to-wall flow) is always exhibited regardless of the wettability of the channel wall, which is also indicative of the validity of the above-mentioned assertion.