Recently, there has been a growing interest in using induced electro-osmosis to pump fluids in microfluidic devices. We show that induced electroosmosis can also be used to promote stirring and chaotic advection. To this end, we study theoretically a stirrer in which the flow patterns are alternated in time. We first analyze an idealized embodiment of the stirrer that admits a simple analytical...

A high-pressure electro-osmotic micro-pump fabricated by a sol-gel process is reported as a fluid-driving unit in a flow-injection analysis (FIA) system. The micro FIA system consists of a monolithic micro-pump on a glass slide (2.5 x 7.5 cm), a micro-injector, and a micro-sensor (2.5 x 1.5 cm). The monolithic silica matrix has a continuous skeleton morphology with micrometer-sized through-pore...

Abstract

We present mesoscopic simulations of the counterion-induced electro-osmotic flow in different electrostatic coupling regimes. Two simulation methods are compared, dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) and coupled lattice-Boltzmann/molecular dynamics (LB/MD). A general mapping scheme to match DPD to LB/MD is developed. For the weak coupling regime, analytic expressions for the flow profiles in the...

Coupled electron and proton transport are an integral part of non-gassing electro-osmotic pumps (EOP). The kinetics of the electrode limits the kinetics of the electron transfer and hence the flow. This is observed in the present study with newly synthesized graphitic carbon covalently coupled to poly(anthraquinone) (PAQ). When EOP with identical electrodes were assembled, proton shuttle mainta...

The kinesin-microtubule system plays an important role in intracellular transport and is a model system for integrating biomotor-driven transport into microengineered devices. AC electrokinetics provides a novel tool for manipulating and organizing microtubules in solution, enabling new experimental geometries for investigating and controlling the interactions of microtubules and microtubule mo...