LAUSR

Abstract Electrokinetic mixing enhancement of an aqueous electrolyte due to advection-diffusion mechanism is proposed in a microchannel with wavy side walls. Usually, the electrolyte movement in polyvinyl chloride or teflon textured surface material leads to the generation of an electric double layer (EDL) because of the attraction & repulsion of counter and co-ions. A transverse electric field is enforced along the horizontal direction to create an electroosmotic flow (EOF) and the channel walls are pretended to be composed of two superimposed sinusoidal waves. The resulting flow field consists of recirculating eddies to achieve an improved passive mixing along the downstream. Through numerical simulations it is predicted that flow advection may be induced by wavy amplitude variation along the channel length. Hence, a parametric estimation is made between the critical wave amplitude for flow separation with the electric field intensity and Debye-H u ¨ ckel parameter. The key aspect of this paper is to analyse mixing efficiency as a function of geometric parameter, solution’s molarity and electric field strength.