Numerical study on electrokinetic interaction between a pair of cylindrical colloidal particles

Electrophoresis is the motion of dispersed particles relative to a fluid under the influence of an electric field. Presently this phenomenon of electrokinetics is widely used in biotechnology for the separation of proteins, sequencing of polypeptide chains etc. The separation efficiency of these biomolecules is affected by their aggregation. Thus it is important to study the interaction forces between the molecules. In this study we calculate the electrophoretic motion of a pair of colloidal particles under axial electric field. The hydrodynamic and electric double layer (EDL) interaction forces are calculated numerically. The EDL interaction force is calculated from electric field distribution around the particle using Maxwell stress tensor and the hydrodynamic force is calculated from the flow field obtained from the solution of Stokes equations. The continuous forcing approach of immersed boundary method is used to obtain flow field around the moving particles. The EDL distribution around the particles is obtained by solving Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) equations on a hybrid grid system. The EDL interaction force calculated from numerical solution is compared with the one obtained from surface element integration (SEI) method.