Affiliations: Division of Engineering, Brown University, Box D 182
Hope St., Providence, RI 02912, U.S.A. E-mail: [email protected] | Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M
University, College Station, TX 77843, U.S.A.
Abstract: Electro-osmosis is the flow produced by the action of an electric
field on a fluid with a net charge, which is created by the Zeta potential and
confined in the Debye layer. This basic phenomenon in the electro-kinetic
transport plays an important role in the microfluidic systems being explored
today because it can be applied to a variety of MEMS devices. This paper
presents global and point-wise comparisons of experimental measurements of
electro-osmotically driven flows in elementary microchannel configurations,
which are made by photolithography using poly-di-methyl-siloxane (PDMS). To
measure full field velocity distributions in PDMS microchannels, a microscopic
particle image velocimetry (μ-PIV) system has been developed to track the
fluorescent images of 500 nm diameter particles. Comparisons of experimental
results among various micro-configurations show feasibilities of the
electro-osmotic flows to use for micro-pumping and micro-fluidic flow
control.