This paper presents a systematic analysis of the sensitivity of design parameters of a microchannel to the onset of the slip effect. This is motivated because design geometries of microsystems cannot be simply downscaled, because at small dimensions inertia and gravity do not necessarily remain the dominant forces, and the behavior of the microsystem to be designed changes. This is particularly important in the design of MEMS involving fluids, where friction in the form of an inversion layer becomes effective. While such characteristics are often exploited in clever design, it is not always known when such effects take place, because they are be the consequence of different combinations of parameters, often represented implicitly as a single quantity: the Reynolds number. However the Reynolds number on its own cannot be controlled, it does not tell us about the sensitivity of the parameters. In our endeavor of developing fast models that are suitable for interactive CAD VR we are interested in the conditions that mark the onset of the dominance of one physical effect over another. To this end we have initiated a systematic set of experiments to calculate the fluid flow for a square and round channel in a systematic way by changing systematically the critical parameters (channel length, side length or diameter, and pressure) including the calculation of the slip effect as an additional term that allows seeing in which combinations it becomes effective.

Date Published: 5 January 2006
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6035, Microelectronics: Design, Technology, and Packaging II, 60350Y (5 January 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.639882

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6035:
Microelectronics: Design, Technology, and Packaging II
Alex J. Hariz, Editor(s)