Study of drag reduction potential in textured microchannels

Reduced length-scales in microchannels is highly favorable for efficient manipulation of the flow and mixing in biochemical devices as well as enhancing heat transfer which makes them an ideal candidate for microelectronics cooling applications. However, these benefits come at the cost of higher pumping power requirements that can be alleviated using surface mixrotexturing. While the results of some of the studies in this field may have been misconstrued due to the lack of a proper smooth reference channel selection, it is critical to understand this in order to conduct valid comparisons. Considering a smooth reference channel that occupies the same volume as the textured microchannels, we have performed numerical simulations and experiments to study the effect of important geometrical parameters of the trenches on the Poiseuille number, which represents the non-dimensional hydraulic resistance of a channel.