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Updated: May 24, 2026

Generation and Control of Electrohydrodynamic Flows in Aqueous Electrolyte Solutions
Published on: September 7, 2018
Coupling electrokinetics and rheology: Electrophoresis in non-Newtonian fluids
Aditya S Khair1, Denise E Posluszny, Lynn M Walker
1Department of Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA.
Abstract:
We present a theoretical scheme to calculate the electrophoretic motion of charged colloidal particles immersed in complex (non-Newtonian) fluids possessing shear-rate-dependent viscosities. We demonstrate that this non-Newtonian rheology leads to an explicit shape and size dependence of the electrophoretic velocity of a uniformly charged particle in the thin-Debye-layer regime, in contrast to electrophoresis in Newtonian fluids. This dependence is caused by non-Newtonian stresses in the bulk (electroneutral) fluid outside the Debye layer, whose magnitude is naturally characterized in an electrophoretic Deborah number.
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