Inertial migration of bidisperse suspensions flowing in microchannels: effect of particle diameters ratio

Abstract : Up to date, inertial migration of particles in microflows has demonstrated a great potential for a wide range of applications. In particular, this phenomenon is used to achieve particle separation or sorting in a suspension. Recent works reported that the focusing mode of particles can be modified in a polydisperse suspension. Nevertheless, the impact of the particle sizes in a mixture on their inertial migration has been rarely studied up to now. Thus, we have investigated in this work the influence of bidispersity on the lateral migration of the particles towards equilibrium positions and on their longitudinal ordering into trains. Different changes in the particles behavior were observed when the ratio between the particle sizes (dp1/dp2) varied from 1.64 to 4.58.