An ion-exchange-resin-based microfluidic pump is introduced that utilizes trace amounts of ions to generate fluid flows. We show experimentally that our pump operates in almost deionized water for periods exceeding 24 h and induces fluid flows of μm s over hundreds of μm. This flow displays a far-field, power-law decay which is characteristic of two-dimensional (2D) flow when the system is strongly confined and of three-dimensional (3D) flow when it is not. Using theory and numerical calculations we demonstrate that our observations are consistent with electroosmotic pumping driven by μmol L ion concentrations in the sample cell that serve as 'fuel' to the pump. Our study thus reveals that trace amounts of charge carriers can produce surprisingly strong fluid flows; an insight that should benefit the design of a new class of microfluidic pumps that operate at very low fuel concentrations.

Abstract-Colloidal spheres with a partial platinum surface coating perform auto-phoretic motion when suspended in hydrogen peroxide solution. We present a theoretical analysis of the self-propulsion velocity of these particles using a continuum multi-component, self-diffusiophoretic model. With this model as a basis, we show how the slip-layer approximation can be derived and in which limits it holds. First, we consider the differences between the full multi-component model and the sliplayer approximation. Then the slip model is used to demonstrate and explore the sensitive nature of the particle's velocity on the details of the molecule-surface interaction. We find a strong asymmetry in the dependence of the colloid's velocity as a function of the level of catalytic coating, when there is a different interaction between the solute and solvent molecules and the inert and catalytic part of the colloid, respectively. The direction of motion can even be reversed by varying the level of the catalytic coating. Finally, we investigate the robustness of these results with respect to variations in the reaction rate near the edge between the catalytic and inert parts of the particle. Our results are of significant interest to the interpretation of experimental results on the motion of self-propelled particles.

Electrokinetic transport phenomena can strongly influence the behaviour of macromolecules and colloidal particles in solution, with applications in, e.g., DNA translocation through nanopores, electro-osmotic flow in nanocapillaries, and electrophoresis of charged macromolecules. Numerical simulations are an important tool to investigate these electrokinetic phenomena, but are often plagued by spurious fluxes and spurious flows that can easily exceed physical fluxes and flows. Here, we present a method that reduces one of these spurious currents, spurious flow, by several orders of magnitude. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our method for both the electrokinetic lattice-Boltzmann and finite-element-method based algorithms by simulating a charged sphere in an electrolyte solution and flow through a nanopore. We also show that previous attempts to suppress these spurious currents introduce other sources of error.

The motion of ionic solutes and charged particles under the influence of an electric field and the ensuing hydrodynamic flow of the underlying solvent is ubiquitous in aqueous colloidal suspensions. The physics of such systems is described by a coupled set of differential equations, along with boundary conditions, collectively referred to as the electrokinetic equations. Capuani et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 121, 973 (2004)] introduced a lattice-based method for solving this system of equations, which builds upon the lattice Boltzmann algorithm for the simulation of hydrodynamic flow and exploits computational locality. However, thus far, a description of how to incorporate moving boundary conditions into the Capuani scheme has been lacking. Moving boundary conditions are needed to simulate multiple arbitrarily moving colloids. In this paper, we detail how to introduce such a particle coupling scheme, based on an analogue to the moving boundary method for the pure lattice Boltzmann solver. The key ingredients in our method are mass and charge conservation for the solute species and a partial-volume smoothing of the solute fluxes to minimize discretization artifacts. We demonstrate our algorithm's effectiveness by simulating the electrophoresis of charged spheres in an external field; for a single sphere we compare to the equivalent electro-osmotic (co-moving) problem. Our method's efficiency and ease of implementation should prove beneficial to future simulations of the dynamics in a wide range of complex nanoscopic and colloidal systems that were previously inaccessible to lattice-based continuum algorithms.

We show experimentally that a cheap glass microcapillary can accumulate λ-phage DNA at its tip and deliver the DNA into the capillary using a combination of electro-osmotic flow, pressure-driven flow, and electrophoresis. We develop an efficient simulation model for this phenomenon based on the electrokinetic equations and the finite-element method. Using our model, we explore the large parameter space of the trapping mechanism by varying the salt concentration, the capillary surface charge, the applied voltage, the pressure difference, and the mobility of the analyte molecules. Our simulation results show that this system can be tuned to capture a wide range of analyte molecules, such as DNA or proteins, based on their electrophoretic mobility. Our method for separation and pre-concentration of analytes has implications for the development of low-cost lab-on-a-chip devices.Analytic biochemistry possesses a large variety of methods to purify and pre-concentrate macroscopic amounts of analyte molecules for further processing. These methods are based on precipitation, centrifugation, gel electrophoresis, chromatography, and affinity techniques, to name just a few.