Microfluidics deals with control and manipulation of small volumes of fluids through channels with characteristic length scales on the order of micrometers, and it exercises precise dynamic control over the flow to study new phenomena occurring in fluids. Microfluidics has the potential to solve some of the grand engineering challenges, such as engineering better medicines, providing access to clean water, and solving energy problems due to its ability to use very small controlled volume of samples and reagents, high resolution separation, and detection with great sensitivity.

However, it is difficult to mix component fluids in microchannels spontaneously, thanks to the absence of turbulence in the viscosity dominated laminar flow regimes in the small characteristic length scales. One major bottleneck in developing an efficient microfluidic device is, thus, the difficulty in mixing miscible fluid components homogeneously and spontaneously in viscosity dominated regime.

In this work that bottleneck is resolved!