Estimation and Measurement of Pressure Drop in the Microchannel

In this paper, an innovation approach was used to estimate the pressure drops in the microchannel. The approach took a simple way to calculate the pressure drops, which could reduce the necessity of an embedded pressure sensor inside microchannel. The concept was to design the rectangular branch-channel along the side wall of main flow in the microchannel. When the fluidic flowed through the microchannel, the bubbles would be formed inside the branch-channel. By observing the changes of the bubbles sizes, the pressure drops around the particular sites of the branch-channel could be estimated. As the experiment results, we could indirectly obtain the pressure drops of the micro fluidic around the micro channel by the changes of the bubbles sizes. In addition to demonstrate the estimating of the pressure drops and the concept of the branch-channel design, it has also supported a frame of the channel sizes and the pressure drops to design the proper microchannel.