Low-frequency dielectric response of charged oblate spheroidal particles immersed in an electrolyte.

Abstract

We study the low-frequency polarization response of a surface-charged oblate spheroidal particle immersed in an electrolyte solution. Because the charged spheroid attracts counterions which form the electric double layer around the particle, using usual boundary conditions at the interface between the particle and electrolyte can be quite complicated and challenging. Hence, we generalize Fixman's boundary conditions, originally derived for spherical particles, to the case of the charged oblate spheroid. Given two different counterion distributions in the thin electric double-layer limit, we obtain analytic expressions for the polarization coefficients to the first nontrivial order in frequency. We find that the polarization response normal to the symmetry axis depends on the total amount of charge carried by the oblate spheroid while that parallel to the symmetry axis is suppressed when there is less charge on the edge of the spheroid. We further study the overall dielectric response for a dilute suspension of charged spheroids. We find that the dielectric enhancement at low frequency, which is driven by the presence of a large ζ potential (surface charge), is suppressed by high ion concentrations in the electrolyte and depends on the size of the suspended particles. In addition, spheroids with higher aspect ratios will also lead to a stronger dielectric enhancement due to the combination of the electric double layer and textural effects. The characteristic frequency associated with the dielectric enhancement scales inversely with the square of the particle size, the major radius of the spheroid, and it has a weak dependence on the shape of spheroids.