Display omitted •Simulations are performed to study micromixing in a laminar flow micromixer.•Micromixing is modelled directly with CFD and indirectly with a lamellar model.•Micromixing performance is evaluated using the Villermaux-Dushman protocol.•Both approaches provide results that are in good agreement with experimental data.•The lamellar model is much less computationally intensive than the CFD approach. The CFD simulation of fast reactions in laminar flows can be computationally challenging due to the lack of appropriate sub-grid micromixing models in this flow regime. In this work, simulations of micromixing via the implementation of the competitive-parallel Villermaux/Dushman reactions in a T-micromixer with square bends for Reynolds numbers in the range 60–300 are performed using both a conventional CFD approach and a novel lamellae-based model. In the first, both the hydrodynamics and the concentration fields of the reaction species are determined directly using a finite volume approach. In the second, the hydrodynamic field from the CFD calculations is coupled with a Lagrangian model that is used to perform the chemical reactions indirectly. Both sets of results are compared with previously published experimental data and show very good agreement. The lamellar model has the advantage of being much less computationally intensive than the conventional CFD approach, which requires extremely fine computational grids to resolve sharp concentration gradients. It is a promising solution to model fast chemical reactions in reactors with complex geometries in the laminar regime and for industrial applications.