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Updated: May 29, 2026

Generation and Control of Electrohydrodynamic Flows in Aqueous Electrolyte Solutions
Published on: September 7, 2018
Control of flow rate and concentration in microchannel branches by induced-charge electrokinetic flow
Fang Zhang1, Yasaman Daghighi, Dongqing Li
1Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1.
Abstract:
This paper presents a numerical study of controlling the flow rate and the concentration in a microchannel network by utilizing induced-charge electrokinetic flow (ICEKF). ICEKF over an electrically conducting surface in a microchannel will generate vortices, which can be used to adjust the flow rates and the concentrations in different microchannel branches. The flow field and concentration field were studied under different applied electric fields and with different sizes of the conducting surfaces. The results show that, by using appropriate size of the conducting surfaces in appropriate locations, the microfluidic system can generate not only streams of the same flow rate or linearly decreased flow rates in different channels, but also different, uniform concentrations within a short mixing length quickly.
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