Bubbles can be trapped inside textured structures such as grooves, forming a superhydrophobic surface. A superhydrophobic surface has a large effective hydrodynamic slip length compared to a smooth hydrophobic surface and holds the promise of enhancing electrokinetic flows that find many interesting applications in microfluidics. However, recent theoretical studies suggested that electro-osmoti...

An analytical model is presented for electro-osmotic flow through a wide rectangular microchannel rotating about an axis perpendicular to its own. The flow is driven by a steady electric field applied along the channel axis, where the upper and lower walls are charged with uniform but possibly disparate zeta potentials. The aim is to understand the interaction between Coriolis force, pressure g...

Electro-osmotic flow is studied by nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations in a model system chosen to elucidate various factors affecting the velocity profile and facilitate comparison with existing continuum theories. The model system consists of spherical ions and solvent, with stationary, uniformly charged walls that make a channel with a height of 20 particle diameters. We find that ...

An investigation of water transport across the membrane of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell is performed to gain further insight into water management issues and the overall behavior of a representative phenomenological model. The model accounts for water transport via electro-osmotic drag and diffusion and is solved using a finite volume method for a one-dimensional isothermal system. Tran...

We use a variational principle to derive a mathematical model for a nematic electrolyte in which the liquid crystalline component is described in terms of a second-rank order tensor. The model extends the previously developed director-based theory and accounts for presence of disclinations and possible biaxiality. We verify the model by considering a simple but illustrative example of liquid cr...

This work presents an innovative integration of sensing and nano-scaled fluidic actuation in the combination of pH sensitive optical dye immobilization with the electro-osmotic phenomena in polar solvents like water for flow-through pH measurements. These flow-through measurements are performed in a flow-through sensing device (FTSD) configuration that is designed and fabricated at MTU. A relat...

Fluidic flow and species transport in integrated microfluidic devices can readily be simulated with computational fluid dynamics. Nevertheless, the common practice to evaluate the solution accuracy is to decrease the discretization size (i.e., mesh size) until the value of the quantity of interest (termed ‘‘output’’ here-in) does not change within a fixed tolerance. For systems of partial diffe...

We present a numerical study of induced-charge electro-osmosis (ICEO) of electrolytes in microfluidic channels containing a fixed dielectric structure. ICEO is the nonlinear electro-osmotic slip that occurs in the electrolyte when an applied electric field acts on the ionic charge it induces around the polarizable surface of the dielectric structure. We also establish a method for optimizing th...

This paper investigates the effects of roughness and cavitations in microchannels on the electro-osmotic flow behaviors using the Lattice Poisson–Boltzmann methods which combined one lattice evolution method for solving the non-linear Poisson–Boltzmann equation for electric potential distribution with the other lattice evolution method for solving the Navier–Stokes equations for fluid flow. The...