Effective slip in pressure-driven flow past super-hydrophobic stripes

Abstract

A super-hydrophobic array of grooves containing trapped gas (stripes) has the potential to greatly reduce drag and enhance mixing phenomena in microfluidic devices. Recent work has focused on idealized cases of stick-perfect slip stripes. Here, we analyse the experimentally more relevant situation of a pressure-driven flow past striped slip-stick surfaces with arbitrary local slip at the gas sectors. We derive approximate formulas for maximal (longitudinal) and minimal (transverse) directional effective slip lengths that are in a good agreement with the exact numerical solution for any surface slip fraction. By representing eigenvalues of the slip length tensor, we obtain the effective slip for any orientation of stripes with respect to the mean flow. Our results imply that flow past stripes is controlled by the ratio of the local slip length to texture size. In the case of a large (compared to the texture period) slip at the gas areas, surface anisotropy leads to a tensorial effective slip, by attaining the values predicted earlier for a perfect local slip. Both effective slip lengths and anisotropy of the flow decrease when local slip becomes of the order of texture period. In the case of a small slip, we predict simple surface-averaged isotropic flows (independent of orientation).