ac electrokinetic micropumps: The effect of geometrical confinement, Faradaic current injection, and nonlinear surface capacitance

Abstract

Recent experiments have demonstrated that ac electrokinetic micropumps permit integrable, local, and fast pumping (velocities approximately mm/s) with low driving voltage of a few volts only. However, they also displayed many quantitative and qualitative discrepancies with existing theories. We therefore extend the latter theories to account for three experimentally relevant effects: (i) vertical confinement of the pumping channel, (ii) Faradaic currents from electrochemical reactions at the electrodes, and (iii) nonlinear surface capacitance of the Debye layer. We report here that these effects indeed affect the pump performance in a way that we can rationalize by physical arguments.