A practical guide to the staggered herringbone mixer.

An analytical model of mixing in the staggered herringbone mixer (SHM) was derived to estimate mixing parameters and provide practical expressions to guide mixer design and operation for a wide range of possible solutes and flow conditions. Mixing in microfluidic systems has historically been characterized by the mixing of a specific solute system or by the redistribution of flow streams; this approach does not give any insight into the ideal operational parameters of the mixer with an arbitrary real system. For Stokes-flow mixers, mixing can be computed from a relationship between solute diffusivity, flow rate, and mixer length.