IJRET: International Journal of Research in Engineering and Technology eISSN: 2319-1163 | pISSN: 2321-7308 __________________________________________________________________________________________ Volume: 02 Issue: 11 | Nov-2013, Available @ http://www.ijret.org 207 EFFECT OF TEMPERATURE VARIATION ON FLUID FLOW ACROSS A Cu–MICA MICROCHANNEL Harneet KourKhajuria 1 , Simranjit Kaur 2 , Parveen Lehana 3 1 M.tech student, 2 Assistant Professor, Dept. of E&C, SSCET, Badhani, Pathankot, Punjab, India 3 Associate Professor, Dept. of Physics & Electronics, University of Jammu, Jammu, India harneet.destiny@gmail.com, simran2013@yahoo.com, klehanajournals@gmail.com Abstract Microfluidics is a science of fluid mechanics involving micro-scale dimensions. The research in miniaturization of microfluidic devices and its use for microfluidic applications is increasing exponentially. The success of microfluidics owes to its inherent potential of influencing other fields such as chemical synthesis, biological analysis, optics, and information technology, etc. Various factors may affect the microfluidic behavior such as nature of microfluids, surface tension, contact angle, channel shape, temperature, viscosity, etc. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of temperature on microfluidic flow across a Cu–Mica microchannel. The microchannel was fabricated using a screen printing technique followed by substrate etching. Three different microfluids namely Ethanol, Methanol, and Chloroform were considered for investigations. The angle of elevation of the microchannel was maintained constant during all the investigations. The analysis of results showed that the flow rate of microfluids is temperature and fluid dependent. Keywords: Cu-Mica Microchannel, Microfluid, Microfluidics, Microfludic Flow. ----------------------------------------------------------------------***-------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. INTRODUCTION Microfluidics is considered as an interdisciplinary field in its adolescence. The success of microfluidics owes to its inherent potential of influencing other fields such as chemical synthesis, biological analysis, optics, and information technology, etc. Microfluidics is defined technically as science of fluid mechanics studied at micro scale [1]. It is formed by integration of many parental fields such as molecular biology, molecular analysis, bio defense, and microelectronics and thus microfluidics has become the only solution to overcome the problems associated with development of high resolution and highly sensitive analytical methods used in microanalysis purposes [1, 2]. Microfluidics deals with the study of the behavior, precise control, and the manipulation of fluids constrained to sub- millimeter scale that is at micro scale [1]. When different micro-components capable of processing are integrated together with precisely manipulated small volumes of fluids preferably varying in range from pico-liter to micro- liter; a fluidic system is formed at micro scale called microfluidic system [1-3]. Microfluidic systems possess the ability to carry out high resolution and sensitive separations and detections using very small quantities of samples and reagents which make this system inexpensive requiring short time analysis [1]. Microfluidic devices essentially contain one or more microchannels of dimensions not greater than 1mm to perform fluid analysis at micro domains [1, 2]. Most of microscale investigations of fluids are carried out using flow injection analysis as discussed in the succeeding section. 1.1 Flow Injection Analysis Flow injection analysis (FIA) is a continuous flow technique used for chemical analysis using syringes. It provides a precise and good analytical performance with high reproducibility and sensitivity. Faster and high throughput analysis can be obtained at low costs using FIA techniques. Microfluidic devices are more advantageous than simple fluidic analysis since they require very small amount of reagents and chemicals which makes the analysis scalable to faster and high throughput oriented analysis [1-3]. The paper is divided into various sections. Dynamics of fluidic flow includes introduction to various parameters essential for microfluidic analysis such as surface tension, contact angle, and viscosity as discussed in Section 2. Section 3 describes the methodology involved for proposed investigations followed by results and discussions in Section 4. Conclusions are drawn in Section 5. 2. DYNAMICS OF FLUIDIC FLOW The important factors affecting dynamics of microfluidic flow are surface tension, contact angle, and viscosity. These are described as follows.