Electroosmotic Flow Through a Circular Tube With Slip-Stick Striped Wall

Abstract

This is an analytical study on electrohydrodynamic flows through a circular tube, of which the wall is micropatterned with a periodic array of longitudinal or transverse slip-stick stripes. One unit of the wall pattern comprises two stripes, one slipping and the other nonslipping, and each with a distinct ζ potential. Using the methods of eigenfunction expansion and point collocation, the electric potential and velocity fields are determined by solving the linearized Poisson–Boltzmann equation and the Stokes equation subject to the mixed electrohydrodynamic boundary conditions. The effective equations for the fluid and current fluxes are deduced as functions of the slipping area fraction of the wall, the intrinsic hydrodynamic slip length, the Debye parameter, and the ζ potentials. The theoretical limits for some particular wall patterns, which are available in the literature only for plane channels, are extended in this paper to the case of a circular channel. We confirm that some remarks made earlier for electroosmotic flow over a plane surface are also applicable to the present problem involving patterns on a circular surface. We pay particular attention to the effects of the pattern pitch on the flow in both the longitudinal and transverse configurations. When the wall is uniformly charged, the adverse effect on the electroosmotic flow enhancement due to a small fraction of area being covered by no-slip slots can be amplified if the pitch decreases. Reducing the pitch will also lead to a greater deviation from the Helmholtz–Smoluchowski limit when the slipping regions are uncharged. With oppositely charged slipping regions, local recirculation or a net reversed flow is possible, even when the wall is on the average electropositive or neutral. The flow morphology is found to be subject to the combined influence of the geometry of the tube and the electrohydrodynamic properties of the wall.