title: Biomimetic microchannels of planar reactors for optimized photocatalytic efficiency of water purification.
abstract: This paper reports a biomimetic design of microchannels in the planar reactors with the aim to optimize the photocatalytic efficiency of water purification. Inspired from biology, a bifurcated microchannel has been designed based on the Murray's law to connect to the reaction chamber for photocatalytic reaction. The microchannels are designed to have a constant depth of 50 μm but variable aspect ratios ranging from 0.015 to 0.125. To prove its effectiveness for photocatalytic water purification, the biomimetic planar reactors have been tested and compared with the non-biomimetic ones, showing an improvement of the degradation efficiency by 68%. By employing the finite element method, the flow process of the designed microchannel reactors has been simulated and analyzed. It is found that the biomimetic design owns a larger flow velocity fluctuation than that of the non-biomimetic one, which in turn results in a faster photocatalytic reaction speed. Such a biomimetic design paves the way for the design of more efficient planar reactors and may also find applications in other microfluidic systems that involve the use of microchannels.
authors.forename: Wuxia
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Liao
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics , Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 3888, Dongnanhu Road, Changchun, Jilin, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Taisheng
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics , Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 3888, Dongnanhu Road, Changchun, Jilin, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Jia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics , Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 3888, Dongnanhu Road, Changchun, Jilin, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Xudong
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Han
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics, Changchun Institute of Optics , Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, No. 3888, Dongnanhu Road, Changchun, Jilin, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Zhenyu
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Xuming
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9326-5547
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Spectral Imaging Technology, Xi'an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , No. 17, Xinxi Road, Xian 710119, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Weixing
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Yu