Effects of the Reynolds number on two-dimensional dielectrophoretic motions of a pair of particles under a uniform electric field

Abstract

This paper presents two-dimensional direct numerical simulations to explore the effect of the Reynolds number on the Dielectrophoretic (DEP) motion of a pair of freely suspended particles in an unbounded viscous fluid under an external uniform electric field. Accordingly, the electric potential is obtained by solving the Maxwell’s equation with a great sudden change in the electric conductivity at the particle-fluid interface and then the Maxwell stress tensor is integrated to determine the DEP force exerted on each particle. The fluid flow and particle movement, on the other hand, are predicted by solving the continuity and Navier-Stokes equations together with the kinetic equations. Numerical simulations are carried out using a finite volume approach, composed of a sharp interface method for the electric potential and a direct-forcing immersed-boundary method for the fluid flow. Through the simulations, it is found that both particles with the same sign of the conductivity revolve and eventually align themselves in a line with the electric field. With different signs, to the contrary, they revolve in the reverse way and eventually become lined up at a right angle with the electric field. The DEP motion also depends significantly on the Reynolds number defined based on the external electric field for all the combinations of the conductivity signs. When the Reynolds number is approximately below Re_cr ≈ 0.1, the DEP motion becomes independent of the Reynolds number and thus can be exactly predicted by the no-inertia solver that neglects all the inertial and convective effects. With increasing Reynolds number above the critical number, on the other hand, the particles trace larger trajectories and thus take longer time during their revolution to the eventual in-line alignment.