Electrokinetic flow in the U-shaped micro-nanochannels
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1-s2.0-S2095034919300121-main.pdf
Description
Published version
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915.63 KB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
36f4b6157d07dc8eef1e5f0ece1394b8
Author(s)
Qiu, Bilong
Gong, Lingyan
Li, Zirui
Han, Jongyoon
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Letters
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Chinese Society of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics U-shaped micro-nanochannels can generate significant flow disturbance as well as locally amplified electric field, which gives itself potential to be microfluidic mixers, electrokinetic pumps, and even cell lysis process. Numerical simulation is utilized in this work to study the hidden characteristics of the U-shaped micro-nanochannel system, and the effects of key controlling parameters (the external voltage and pressure) on the device output metrics (current, maximum values of electric field, shear stress and flow velocity) were evaluated. A large portion of current flowing through the whole system goes through the nanochannels, rather than the middle part of the microchannel, with its value increasing linearly with the increase of voltage. Due to the local ion depletion near micro-nanofluidic junction, significantly enhanced electric field (as much as 15 fold at V=1 V and P 0 =0) as well as strong shear stress (leading to electrokinetic flow) is generated. With increasing external pressure, both electric field and shear stress can be increased initially (due to shortening of depletion region length), but are suppressed eventually at higher pressure due to the destruction of ion depletion layer. Insights gained from this study could be useful for designing nonlinear electrokinetic pumps and other systems.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.taml.2019.01.006
