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An electric field has been extensively used to manipulate fluids and particles via electrokinetic flow in microchannels and nanochannels for various lab-on-a-chip applications. Recent studies have demonstrated the action of a dielectrophoretic-like lift force on near-wall particles in an electrokinetic flow due to the particles' modifications of the field-line structure adjacent to a planar wall. This work presents a fundamental investigation of the lateral migration of dielectric particles in the electrokinetic flow of buffer solutions of varying molar concentrations through a straight rectangular microchannel. We find that the particle migration-induced electrokinetic centerline focusing is significantly enhanced with the decrease of the buffer concentration. This observed phenomenon may be attributed to the increased surface conduction effect in a lower-concentration buffer that yields a larger Dukhin number, Du. It seems qualitatively consistent with a recent theoretical study that predicts a greater wall-induced electrical lift with the increasing value of the Dukhin number for Du ≥1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electrokinetic flow, due to a nearly plug-like velocity profile, is the preferred mode for transport of fluids (by electroosmosis) and species (by electrophoresis if charged) in microfluidic devices. Thus far there have been numerous studies on electrokinetic flow within a variety of microchannel structures. However, the fluid and species behaviors at the interface of the inlet reservoir (i.e., the well that supplies the fluid and species) and microchannel are still largely unexplored. This work presents a fundamental investigation of the induced charge effects on electrokinetic entry flow due to the polarization of dielectric corners at the inlet reservoir-microchannel junction.We use small tracing particles suspended in a low ionic concentration fluid to visualize the electrokinetic flow pattern in the absence of Joule heating effects. Particles are found to get trapped and concentrated inside a pair of counterrotating fluid circulations near the corners of the channel entrance.We also develop a depth-averaged numerical model to understand the induced charge on the corner surfaces and simulate the resultant induced charge electroosmosis (ICEO) in the horizontal plane of the microchannel. The particle streaklines predicted from this model are compared with the experimental images of tracing particles, which shows a significantly better agreement than those from a regular two-dimensional model. This study indicates the strong influences of the top/bottom walls on ICEO in shallow microchannels, which have been neglected in previous two-dimensional models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particle separation has found practical applications in many areas from industry to academia. Current electrokinetic particle separation techniques primarily rely on dielectrophoresis, where the electric field gradients are generated by either active microelectrodes or inert micro-insulators. We develop herein a new type of electrokinetic method to continuously separate particles in a bifurcating microchannel. This sheath-free separation makes use of the inherent wall-induced electrical lift to focus particles towards the centerline of the main-branch and then deflect them to size-dependent flow paths in each side-branch. A theoretical model is also developed to understand such a size-based separation, which simulates the experimental observations with a good agreement. This electric fielddriven sheathless separation can potentially be operated in a parallel or cascade mode to increase the particle throughput or resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trapping and preconcentrating particles and cells for enhanced detection and analysis are often essential in many chemical and biological applications. Existing methods for diamagnetic particle trapping require the placement of one or multiple pairs of magnets nearby the particle flowing channel. The strong attractive or repulsive force between the magnets makes it difficult to align and place them close enough to the channel, which not only complicates the device fabrication but also restricts the particle trapping performance. This work demonstrates for the first time the use of a single permanent magnet to simultaneously trap diamagnetic and magnetic particles in ferrofluid flows through a T-shaped microchannel. The two types of particles are preconcentrated to distinct locations of the T-junction due to the induced negative and positive magnetophoretic motions, respectively. Moreover, they can be sequentially released from their respective trapping spots by simply increasing the ferrofluid flow rate. In addition, a three-dimensional numerical model is developed, which predicts with a reasonable agreement the trajectories of diamagnetic and magnetic particles as well as the buildup of ferrofluid nanoparticles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature, conventional electrokinetics is widely used as a principle of operating nanofluidic devices. Different from the conventional electrokinetics involving nonpolarizable solid surfaces with fixed surface charge, induced-charge electrokinetic (ICEK) phenomena deal with polarizable surfaces with the ability of surface charge modulation through electric polarization under external electric fields. Because of several advantages, ICEK phenomena have drawn a great deal of attention in microfluidic community. Herein, we propose the first effort of extending the ICEK phenomena from microfluidics to nanofluidics. In particular, we report a numerical model for the ICEK phenomena in a tapered nanochannel with conducting (ideally polarizable) walls. It is shown that due to the broken geometric symmetry of the nanochannel, induced-charge electroosmotic flow inside the nanochannel exhibits a flow rectification such that electrolyte solution always flows from the narrow end of the nanochannel to the wide end for either a forward electric bias (electric field from the narrow to wide ends) or a reverse electric bias (electric field from the wide to narrow ends). In addition, we demonstrate that the ion selectivity of such tapered conducting nanochannel can be actively tuned to be cation-selective with a forward bias and anion-selective with a reverse bias. Promisingly, conducting nanochannels with broken geometric symmetry could be potentially used for constructing nanofluidic pumps with the unidirectional pumping capacity and ion selectors with the tuneable ionic selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]