Tailored mixing inside a translating droplet

Tailored mixing inside individual droplets could be useful to ensure that reactions within microscopic discrete fluid volumes, which are used as microreactors in "digital microfluidic" applications, take place in a controlled fashion. In this paper we consider a translating spherical liquid drop to which we impose a time periodic rigid-body rotation. Such a rotation not only induces mixing via chaotic advection, which operates through the stretching and folding of material lines, but also offers the possibility of tuning the mixing by controlling the location and size of the mixing region. Tuned mixing is achieved by judiciously adjusting the amplitude and frequency of the rotation, which are determined by using a resonance condition and following the evolution of adiabatic invariants. As the size of the mixing region is increased, complete mixing within the drop is obtained.