Combined electroosmotic and pressure‐driven transport of neutral solutes across a rough, porous‐walled microtube

Abstract

A number of microfluidic systems of interest essentially consist of micro‐scaled channels/tubes, whose walls are inherently rough. The novelty of the current study lies in exploring the impact of the wall roughness on mass transfer in the case of flow through a microtube with porous wall. The current investigation is possibly the first attempt at exploring the effect of mass transfer for a porous‐walled, rough microtube, as earlier studies were limited to the analysis of hydrodynamic and thermal effects only in an impervious microtube. In particular, the effects of the corrugation amplitude and the wavenumber on the mass transport have been assessed in detail in this work, via a combination of perturbation approximations and numerical analysis. Several interesting revelations are elicited regarding the effects of these pertinent parameters on the mass transfer coefficient, permeation flux, wall surface concentration, and delivery flux of the neutral solute. It has been unveiled that it is possible to enhance the solute mass flux by 10% via appropriate tuning of corrugation amplitude. The findings of the study can help in better understanding of mass transport for a porous‐walled, rough microtube, which has critical relevance in several important applications such as micromixers, targeted drug delivery, and so on.

Research on electromagnetic electroosmotic flow of Jeffrey fluid through semicircular microchannel

“…Roy et al [14] carried out a theoretical study on the transport of a neutral solute in incompressible electro-osmotic flow of Bingham plastic non-Newtonian liquid flowing through a microchannel. Sengupta et al [15] reported a study on the combined transport of electroosmosis and pressure-driven flow in rough porous-walled microtubules.…”