(Other presentations are in the list.)
presented at the group seminar on 4/3/2008
I will give a review (or hopefully informal lecture) about electroosmosis and electrophoresis, which are major mechanisms utilized in nanotechnology, especially nanofluidics (it is used as a pump without any moving components). The subject is the flow due to the charged boundaries or objects in electrolyte solution under external electric field. I focus only on the continuous theories where the fluid velocity is governed by the Stokes equation, electric potential by the Poisson equation, and the charge densities by the Boltzmann distribution or Nernst-Planck equation. After Smoluchowski's work in 19th century, these coupled partial differential equations for the fields are solved under several conditions. I'll review studies in the literature by now, hoping that sometime we may have kind of brain-storming discussions in our theory-and-modeling group for NEW nanofluidic technology! (and personally I hope somebody will give the counter-part lecture from the molecular-theory point of view.)
