Reducing spurious flow in simulations of electrokinetic phenomena

Area of Science:

• Computational physics
• Physical chemistry
• Nanotechnology

Background:

• Electrokinetic transport phenomena govern macromolecule and particle behavior in solutions.
• Applications include DNA translocation, electro-osmotic flow, and electrophoresis.
• Numerical simulations are crucial but often suffer from spurious flows exceeding physical ones.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a new method for reducing spurious flow in electrokinetic simulations.
• To demonstrate the method's effectiveness and generality across different simulation algorithms.
• To compare the new method with previous attempts to suppress spurious currents.

Main Methods:

• Developed and applied a novel method to mitigate spurious flow.
• Utilized electrokinetic lattice-Boltzmann and finite-element-method based algorithms.
• Simulated a charged sphere in an electrolyte and flow through a nanopore.

Main Results:

• Reduced spurious flow by several orders of magnitude.
• Demonstrated effectiveness for both lattice-Boltzmann and finite-element methods.
• Showcased the method's applicability in charged sphere and nanopore flow simulations.

Conclusions:

• The presented method effectively suppresses spurious flow in electrokinetic simulations.
• Previous methods for error reduction introduced alternative inaccuracies.
• This work offers a more accurate simulation approach for electrokinetic phenomena.