Lattice Poisson-Boltzmann Simulations of Electroosmotic Flows in Charged Anisotropic Porous Media

Abstract

This paper presents numerical analysis of electroosmotic flows (EOF) in chargedanisotropic porous mediausing the latticePoisson-Boltzmann method (LPBM), which combines two sets of lattice evolution methods solving the nonlinear Poisson equation for electric potential distribution and the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow respectively. Consistent boundary condition implementations are proposed for solving both the electrodynamics and the hydrodynamics on a same grid set. The anisotropic structure effects on EOF characteristics are therefore studied by modeling the electrically driven flows through ellipse arrays packed in a microchannel whose shape and orientation angle are used to control the anisotropy of porous media. The results show that flow rates increase with the axis length along the external electric field direction for a certain porosity and decrease with the angle between the semima- jor axis and the bulk flow direction when the orientation angle is smaller than π/2. After introducing random factors into the microstructures of porous media, the sta- tistical results of flow rate show that the anisotropy of microstructure decreases the permeability of EOFs in porous media.