A Skin-like Microfluidic Cooling Device:Construction,Energy-Consumption And Applications

Microfluidic technology is about building and accurately controlling micro-flow in micro-scale space. In recent years, this area is not only continuing to develop new means on the internal microflow, but also paying attention the external world. Among these, skin-like microfluidics could be one example,which may function to heat interchange between internal and external just like human-skin. This paper will discuss the fabrication of such a type of skin-like microfluidic device, and its energy consumption features and possible application cases.First, Inspired from the nature,We design a microflow paths with the characteristic of leaf-vein,and discuss the fabrication processing to realize so-called skin-like microfluidic device composited via PDMS/glass in which the established patterns was based on UV plate printing method.Then,The thermodynamic performance of the device was experimental characterized the skin-like device connected with thermocouples from inlet to outlet was fixed to a custom-made experiment table that is suitable for setting atmospheric temperature and camera operation. Before the start of the experiment,the device was pre-heated to 35~40oC, and the flowing water(0oC and 21oC,respectively) at 0.5,5,15 mL/min was driven into the skin-like device from inlet to ouelet, The PDMS surface temperature change was recorded by thermocouple and infrared thermal imager,The results found that the 0 oC water could cool the preheated device from 35~40oC to 17oC,The RT water also cool the device from 35~40oC to 28~30oC in about 15 minutes.Further, the energy consumption contrast analysis shows that this seemingly simple skin-like microfluidic device,once establishing the interaction between inner low-temperature micro-flow and external high-temperature field,presents its very considerable cooling ability and in other word, this type of microfluidic device posses good energy saving effect.A steady-state heat transfer model was established to discuss the experiment data and make more general estimates as functions of device size, channel geometry, flow rate, and water temperature.Finally,Some possible application cases of the skin-like microfluidic device were mentioned and given preliminarily analysed,such as temperature control in bioreactor,greenhouse, and other engineering cases.