Abstract
PurposeJoule heating effect is a pervasive phenomenon in electro-osmotic flow because of the applied electric field and fluid electrical resistivity across the microchannels. Its effect in electro-osmotic flow field is an important mechanism to control the flow inside the microchannels and it includes numerous applications.Design/methodology/approachThis research article details the numerical investigation on alterations in the profile of stream wise velocity of simple Couette-electroosmotic flow and pressure driven electro-osmotic Couette flow by the dynamic viscosity variations happened due to the Joule heating effect throughout the dielectric fluid usually observed in various microfluidic devices.FindingsThe advantages of the Joule heating effect are not only to control the velocity in microchannels but also to act as an active method to enhance the mixing efficiency. The results of numerical investigations reveal that the thermal field due to Joule heating effect causes considerable variation of dynamic viscosity across the microchannel to initiate a shear flow when EDL (Electrical Double Layer) thickness is increased and is being varied across the channel.Originality/valueThis research work suggest how joule heating can be used as en effective mechanism for flow control in microfluidic devices.
Highlights
1.1 Electro-osmotic flow The chemical state of the dielectric solution present in most of the microfluidic devices changes due to the presence of charged surfaces of the microchannel walls
Joule heating effect is a pervasive phenomenon in electro-osmotic flow due to the applied electric field across the microchannels
1.0 these challenges, a Taylor series expansion of the right-hand side term is employed for Flow control in linearization of the nonlinear source term of Eqn (20), and the equation is solved by using point successive over-relaxation (PSOR) method, which is a variant of the Gauss–Seidel method for solving a linear system of equations that results in faster convergence
Summary
1.1 Electro-osmotic flow The chemical state of the dielectric solution present in most of the microfluidic devices changes due to the presence of charged surfaces of the microchannel walls. Charged ions in solution is attracted towards these charged surfaces in the EDL. A flow can be initiated with the help of an externally applied electric field (Masliyah, 2021) and is tangential to the microchannel wall surfaces due to the presence of viscous drag. Among different mechanisms to control flow in microfluidic gadgets, the electro-osmotic effects are being developed as a promising method, especially under the profoundly viscous situations for highly laminar flow regimes in which the Reynolds number is less than the unity
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