Abstract: Most previous studies about chaotic mixing focused on time-periodic or spatialy-periodic flows.In contrary,fewer studies have been done in aperiodic flows.In this paper,the chaotic mixing generated by periodic and aperiodic flows is investigated through visible experiments and numerical simulations.The distribution of stretching is found to be much more uniform for apeiodic flows and mixing efficiency of aperiodic flows is higher than periodic flows.Among the several aperiodic sequences,the SB sequence is the best one.