A-Posteriori Finite Element Bound and Adaptive Discretization Methods for the Electro-Osmotic Flows in Heterogeneous Microchannels

Numerical simulation based a design tool devised by an aposteriori error estimation technique termed the ‘bound method’ is applied in this paper to examine and analyze fluidic flow and species transport phenomena of the electro-osmotic flow in a heterogeneously charged T-shaped micro-mixer. This novel technique provides fast, inexpensive and reliable bounds to the ‘output’ for the slip velocity model of the electro-osmotic flow. The bound method presented here-in is extended to use of an adaptive refinement to generate the ‘ideal’ mesh for computations, the direct equilibration to evaluate the ‘hybrid-flux’ very efficiently, and a parallel calculation to accelerate the error estimates of the output of interest.