Mixing performance of an expansive mixer on viscoelastic solutions under alternating current electric field

Development of effective technologies for mixing viscoelastic solutions with reagents is still a challenge, which plays an important role in the fields of disease diagnosis, water desalination, and immunoassay. The purpose of this paper is to numerically study the mixing performance of an expansive mixer on the viscoelastic solution under the impact of an alternating current (AC) electric field through the analyzation of mixing efficiency, the concentration distribution, and average outlet velocity. A poly acrylic acid (PAA) water solution with different concentrations characterized by the Oldroyd-B constitutive model is used as a mixed medium, and an open-source toolbox called rheoTool based on finite volume algorithm is applied to solve the governing equations. We quantitatively determine the mixing efficiency for different PAA concentrations, AC electric field strengths, and frequencies and compare the mixing efficiency created by AC and direct current (DC) electric fields. Our investigation indicates that the mixing efficiency of the mixer diminishes with the PAA concentrations but enhances with the AC electric field strengths for a relatively high polymer concentration, and AC electric fields with different frequencies lead to a larger mixing efficiency than DC electric fields for a low polymer concentration. Additionally, the influence of the model parameters on the average outlet velocity and concentration distribution is discussed at length. Our numerical simulation results show that the mixer has an excellent mixing performance for both Newtonian and viscoelastic solutions, with a mixing efficiency of more than 99% at a low polymer concentration and a stable outflow velocity.