Polyelectrolyte Electrophoresis in Nanochannels: A Dissipative Particle Dynamics Simulation

Abstract

We present mesoscopic DPD-simulations of polyelectrolyte electrophoresis in confined nanogeometries, for varying salt concentration and surface slip conditions. Special attention is given to the influence of electroosmotic flow (EOF) on the migration of the polyelectrolyte. The effective polyelectrolyte mobility is found to depend strongly on the boundary properties, i.e., the slip length and the width of the electric double layer. Analytic expressions for the electroosmotic mobility and the total mobility are derived which are in good agreement with the numerical results. The relevant quantity characterizing the effect of slippage is found to be the dimensionless quantity $\kappa {\delta }_B$, where ${\delta }_B$ is the slip length, and ${\kappa }^{-1}$ an effective electrostatic screening length at the channel boundaries.

8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Statics and Dynamics of Strongly Charged Soft Matter
• Importance of hydrodynamic shielding for the dynamic behavior of short polyelectrolyte chains
• Mesoscale simulations of polymer dynamics in microchannel flows
• Tunable-slip boundaries for coarse-grained simulations of fluid flow
• Simulation of charge reversal in salty environments: Giant overcharging?

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Mesoscopic Simulations of Electroosmotic Flow and Electrophoresis in Nanochannels
• Regularization of the slip length divergence in water nanoflows by inhomogeneities at the Angstrom scale
• Dielectric Response of Nanoscopic Spherical Colloids in Alternating Electric Fields: A Dissipative Particle Dynamics Simulation
• The influence of charged-induced variations in the local permittivity on the static and dynamic properties of polyelectrolyte solutions
• An efficient dissipative particle dynamics-based algorithm for simulating electrolyte solutions
• Computer Simulations of Charged Colloids in Alternating Electric Fields
• Computer simulations of single particles in external electric fields