Issue 29, 2016

Dielectrophoretic sphere–wall repulsion due to a uniform electric field

Abstract

When a zero-net-charge particle is placed under a uniform electric field, the decay of the Maxwell stress with the third power of distance ensures a nil electric force. A nonzero force may nonetheless be generated in the presence of a planar wall due to a mechanism which resembles conventional dielectrophoresis under nonuniform fields. In the prototypical case of a spherical particle this force acts perpendicular to the wall; its magnitude depends upon the pertinent boundary conditions governing the electric potential. When a particle is suspended in an electrolyte solution, where the double-layer structure ensures zero net charge, these conditions are electrokinetic in nature; they involve a balance between bulk conduction and diffusion, represented by normal derivatives, and an effective surface-conduction mechanism, represented by surface-Laplacian terms whose magnitude is quantified by appropriate Dukhin numbers. The dimensionless force depends upon the particle and wall Dukhin numbers as well as the ratio λ of the size of the particle to its distance from the wall. The remote-particle limit λ ≪ 1 is addressed using successive reflections. Calculation of the first few terms in the asymptotic expansion of the force only requires the evaluation of a single reflection from the wall. The leading-order term, scaling as λ4, is repulsive, with a magnitude that varies non-monotonically with the particle Dukhin number and is independent of the wall Dukhin number. Surface conditions on the wall enter only at the O(λ5) leading-order correction.

Graphical abstract: Dielectrophoretic sphere–wall repulsion due to a uniform electric field

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
22 Feb 2016
Accepted
17 Jun 2016
First published
07 Jul 2016

Soft Matter, 2016,12, 6277-6284

Dielectrophoretic sphere–wall repulsion due to a uniform electric field

E. Yariv, Soft Matter, 2016, 12, 6277 DOI: 10.1039/C6SM00462H

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