Experimental study of a liquid fluidization in a microfluidic channel

Significance This study reports the first ever experimental study of true micro‐fluidization: a liquid‐fluidized bed of 30.5 μm micro‐particles within a rectangular micro‐channel of 400 × 175 μm2. The failure to fluidize the micro‐particles with water demonstrated the importance of surface forces for micro‐fluidization. Use of ethanol instead leads to fluidization that is largely well described by conventional fluidization equations, although higher values of empirical constant (k and n) are obtained for Richardson‐Zaki correlation.