DPD Simulation of Electroosmotic Flow in Nanochannels and the Evaluation of Effective Parameters

Abstract

We provide the simulation of electroosmotic phenomenon in nanochannels using the Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) method. We study the electroosmotic phenomenon for both newtonian and non-newtonian fluids. Literature shows that most of past electroosmotic studies have been concentrated on continuum newtonian fluids. However, there are many nano/microfluidic applications, which need to be treated as either nonnewtonian fluids or non-continuum fluids. In this paper, we simulate the electroosmotic flow in nanochannel considering no limit if it is neither continuum nor non-nonewtonian. As is known, the DPD method has several important advantages compared with the classical molecular dynamics (MD) method, e.g., it is computationally more affordable. We benefit from the advantages of DPD method and expand our study to explore the effect of fluid and nanochannel parameters on the electroosmotic flow performance. In other words, we study the parameters that affect the rate of electroosmotic flow and demonstrate the complex behavior of the achieved velocity profiles for newtonian and different types of non-newtonian fluids under various fluid and nanochannel conditions.