Microchannel with porous wall has various microfluidic applications including iontophoresis, diagnostic devices, etc. In order to have an efficient and better design of such devices, exact quantification of velocity field in the microchannel needs to be established. In the present study, an analytical solution of velocity field in a microchannel with porous wall was obtained for a Newtonian fluid in case of a combined electroosmotic and pressure driven flow using perturbation technique. The velocity profile was reduced to well known solutions for three asymptotic cases, namely, purely electroosmotic flow and purely pressure driven flow in an impervious conduit as well as pressure driven flow with permeable wall. The pressure drop profile along the channel length was also generated. Effects of operating parameters, i.e., wall suction velocity, electrolyte concentration and channel half height on velocity and pressure fields were also investigated.
The electroosmotic flow of non-Newtonian fluids in deformable microchannels is fundamentally important in the understanding of the hydrodynamics in physiological flows. The performance of these microchannels is governed by the load bearing capacity indicating the maximum amount of load that the device can withstand. While significant research efforts are aimed towards the coupling of electrokinetics with substrate deformability, the corresponding enhancement in the performances still remains elusive. Towards this, employing an intricate coupling between substrate compliance, hydrodynamic, and …
Due to evergrowing importance of understanding flow of bio-fluids in Lab-on-CD based systems, we investigate the flow behaviour of power-law fluids in the rotating electroosmotic flow through a polyelectrolyte grafted (soft) narrow channel. We use a in-house numerical code to solve the governing transport equations for the velocities and flow rates in a rotating channel subjected to an applied external electric field. We show the strong effect of polyelectrolyte layer on the flow behaviour and find an increase in flow rate as we increase the size of the polyelectrolyte layer. We also show that…
Numerical analyses of transient electro-osmosis of a typical non-Newtonian liquid induced by DC and AC electric fields in a rectangular microchannel are conducted in the framework of continuum fluid mechanics. The famous power-law constitutive model is used to express the fluid dynamic viscosity in terms of the velocity gradient. Transient start-up characteristics of electro-osmotic power-law liquid flow in rectangular microchannels are simulated by using finite element method. Under a DC electric field, it is found out and the fluid is more inert to the external electric field and the steady-…
The transient electroosmotic flow of Maxwell fluid in a rotating microchannel is investigated both analytically and numerically. We bring out the complex dynamics of the flow during the transience due to the combination of rotation and rheological effects. We show the regimes of operation under which our analysis holds the most significance. We also shed some light on the volumetric flow rate characteristics as dictated by the underlying flow physics. Analytical solution compares well with the numerical solution. We believe that the results from the present study could potentially have far rea…
We study the effect of the grafted polyelectrolyte layer on the flow dynamics, and its consequences on underlying mixing in the rotating microfluidic channel. For this analysis, the method used by Sadeghi et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 887, 2020, pp. A13; Phys. Rev. Fluids., vol. 4 (6), 2019, 063701-23), is modified by incorporating the non-linear effect stemming from the polyelectrolyte layer induced electrostatics to solve the coupled system of equations, integrated with the non-homogeneous boundary conditions. This method is used to obtain the velocity distribution in the asymptotic limit of …
Possible mechanisms of overlimiting current in unsupported electrolytes, exceeding diffusion limitation, have been intensely studied for their fundamental significance and applications to desalination, separations, sensing, and energy storage. In bulk membrane systems, the primary physical mechanism is electro-convection, driven by electro-osmotic instability on the membrane surface. It has recently been predicted that confinement by charged surfaces in microchannels or porous media favors two new mechanisms, electro-osmotic flow (EOF) and surface conduction (SC), driven by large electric fiel…
Advent of nematic liquid crystals flows have attracted renewed attention in view of microfluidic transport phenomena. Among various transport processes, electroosmosis stands as one of the efficient flow actuation method through narrow confinement. In the present study, we explore the electrically actuated flow of a nematic fluid with ionic inclusions taking into account the influences from surface induced elastic and electrical double layer phenomena. Influence of surface effects on the flow characteristics is known to get augmented in micro-confined environment and must be properly addressed…
Ion transport in perm-selective media has been extensively investigated in recent years owing to its applications in advancements of fundamental understanding of nanoscale electrokinetics as well as innovative engineering applications. A key phenomenon in this context is ion concentration polarization (ICP) that occurs near perm-selective nanoporous membranes or nanochannels under dc bias. In classical settings, involving voltage-driven transport of ions through perm-selective membranes, concentration polarization is well understood as formation of steep concentration drop to reach near zero c…
Laboratory experiments were conducted to study particle migration and flow properties of non- Brownian, non-colloidal suspensions ranging from 10% to 40% particle volume fraction in a pressure-driven flow over and through a porous structure at low Reynolds number. Particle concentration maps, velocity maps and corresponding profiles were acquired using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique. The model porous medium consists of square arrays of circular rods oriented across the flow in a rectangular microchannel. It was observed that the square arrays of the circular rods modify the veloc…
The flow of viscoelastic fluids in porous media is encountered in many practical applications, such as in the enhanced oil recovery process or in the groundwater remediation. Once the flow rate exceeds a critical value in such flows, an elastic instability with fluctuating flow field is observed, which ultimately transits to a more chaotic and turbulence-like flow structure as the flow rate further increases. In a recent study, it has been experimentally shown that this chaotic flow behaviour of viscoelastic fluids can be suppressed by increasing the geometric disorder in a model porous media …
When using appropriate surfactants, oil and aqueous foam can be intimately mixed without the foam being destroyed. In this Letter, we show that a foam, initially free of oil, can draw an oil drop under the action of capillary forces and stretch it through the aqueous network. We focus on the suction of oil by a single horizontal foam channel, known as a Plateau border. In such confined channels, imbibition dynamics are governed by a balance between capillarity and viscosity. Yet, the scaling law for our system differs from that of classical imbibition in porous media such as aqueous foam. This…
Experimental two-phase invasion percolation flow patterns were observed in hydrophobic micro-porous networks designed to model fuel cell specific porous media. In order to mimic the operational conditions encountered in the porous electrodes of polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), micro-porous networks were fabricated with corresponding microchannel size distributions. The inlet channels were invaded homogeneously with flow rates corresponding to fuel cell current densities of 1.0 to 0.1 A/cm2 (Ca 10e-7-10e-8). A variety of fractal breakthrough patterns were observed and analyzed …
The flow of viscoelastic wormlike micellar solutions (WLMs) in porous media is encountered in many practical applications like enhanced oil recovery or groundwater remediation. To understand the flow dynamics of these complex fluids in porous media, a model porous media consisting of a straight microchannel with micropore throats present in it, is very often used. In this study, we perform an extensive numerical investigation to understand the flow dynamics of wormlike micellar solutions based on the two-species Vasquez-Cook-McKinley (VCM) model for micelles through such model porous media. We…
Shale gas recovery has seen a major boom in recent years due to the increasing global energy demands; but the extraction technologies are very expensive. It is therefore important to develop realistic transport modelling and simulation methods, for porous rocks and porous media, that can compliment the field work. Here, a new nonlinear transport model for single phase gas flow in tight porous media is derived, incorporating many important physical processes that occur in such porous systems: continuous flow, transition flow, slip flow, Knudsen diffusion, adsorption and desorption in to and out…
The accuracy and stability of implicit CFD codes are frequently impaired by the decoupling between variables, which can ultimately lead to numerical divergence. Coupled solvers, which solve all the governing equations simultaneously, have the potential to fix this problem. In this work, we report the implementation of coupled solvers for transient and steady-state electrically-driven flow simulations in the finite-volumes framework. The numerical method, developed in OpenFOAM, is generic for Newtonian and viscoelastic fluids and is formulated for the Poisson-Nernst-Planck and Poisson-Boltzmann…
