Abstract
Unlike pressure-driven flows, surface-mediated phoretic flows provide efficient means to drive fluid motion on very small scales. Colloidal particles covered with chemically-active patches with nonzero phoretic mobility (e.g. Janus particles) swim using self-generated gradients, and similar physics can be exploited to create phoretic pumps. Here we analyse in detail the design principles of phoretic pumps and show that for a minimal phoretic pump, consisting of 3 distinct chemical patches, the optimal arrangement of the patches maximizing the flow rate is universal and independent of chemistry.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 10788 |
| Pages (from-to) | 10788 |
| Number of pages | 1 |
| Journal | Scientific Reports |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 25 Jul 2019 |