Hybrid lattice-Boltzmann and finite-difference simulation of electroosmotic flow in a microchannel

Abstract

A three-dimensional (3D) transient mathematical model is developed to simulate electroosmotic flows (EOFs) in a homogeneous, square cross-section microchannel, with and without considering the effects of axial pressure gradients. The general governing equations for electroosmotic transport are incompressible Navier–Stokes equations for fluid flow and the nonlinear Poisson–Boltzmann (PB) equation for electric potential distribution within the channel. In the present numerical approach, the hydrodynamic equations are solved using a lattice-Boltzmann (LB) algorithm and the PB equation is solved using a finite-difference (FD) method. The hybrid LB–FD numerical scheme is implemented on an iterative framework solving the system of coupled time-dependent partial differential equations subjected to the pertinent boundary conditions. Transient behavior of the EOF and effects due to the variations of different physicochemical parameters on the electroosmotic velocity profile are investigated. Transport characteristics for the case of combined electroosmotic- and pressure-driven microflows are also examined with the present model. For the sake of comparison, the cases of both favorable and adverse pressure gradients are considered. EOF behaviors of the non-Newtonian fluid are studied through implementation of the power-law model in the 3D LB algorithm devised for the fluid flow analysis. Numerical simulations reveal that the rheological characteristic of the fluid changes the EOF pattern to a considerable extent and can have significant consequences in the design of electroosmotically actuated bio-microfluidic systems. To improve the performance of the numerical solver, the proposed algorithm is implemented for parallel computing architectures and the overall parallel performance is found to improve with the number of processors.