Electrokinetic Microfluidic Mixing

Mixing of analytes and reagents is a critical step in Lab-on-Chip or Micro-Total Analysis Systems (mu TAS) due to a laminar behaviour of flows. In this work, we propose a new approach to achieve efficient mixing, which is based on the perturbation of the laminar flow via electrokinetic control of the liquid/liquid interface. High voltage periodic pulses are used to generate a larger interface between two liquids, resulting in an increase of mixing efficiency by diffusion. The advantage of this mixing method is that it does not require (i) any pump, (ii) any zeta potential modification of the surface and (iii) any supplementary high voltage compared to a simple mixing approach only based on diffusion.