Estimation of zeta potential of electroosmotic flow in a microchannel using a reduced-order model

Abstract

A reduced-order model is derived for electroosmotic flow in a microchannel of nonuniform cross section using the Karhunen–Loève Galerkin (KLG) procedure. The resulting reduced-order model is shown to predict electroosmotic flows accurately with minimal consumption of computer time for a wide range of zeta potential ζ and dielectric constant ε. Using the reduced-order model, a practical method is devised to estimate ζ from the velocity measurements of the electroosmotic flow in the microchannel. The proposed method is found to estimate ζ with reasonable accuracy even with noisy velocity measurements.