Electro-osmotic oscillation

A Prototypical Convective Electro-Diffusional Phenomenon—Electro-Osmotic Oscillations... 

Electro-osmotic oscillation (first observed by Teorell [1]—[4] in a laboratory set-up devised to mimic nerve excitation) may likely represent a common source of oscillations in various natural or synthetic electrokinetic systems such as solid microporous filters, synthetic ion-exchange membranes or their biological counterparts. The original experimental set-up, which contained all essential elements to look for when the electro-osmotic oscillations are suspected in a natural system, is schematically as follows. 

In addition, the simple phenomenological relation (6.1.4), with a constant electro-osmotic coefficient lc, was replaced by a more elaborate one, accounting for the w dependence on the flow rate and the concentrations Ci, C2 via a stationary electro-osmotic calculation. This approach was further adopted by Meares and Page [7] [9] who undertook an accurate experimental study of the electro-osmotic oscillations at a Nuclepore filter with a well-defined pore structure. They compared their experimental findings with the numerically found predictions of a theoretical model essentially identical to that of [5], [6]. It was observed that the actual numerical magnitude of the inertial terms practically did not affect the observable features of the system concerned. 

In this chapter we study the electro-osmotic oscillations in some detail. The topic is particularly appealing due to the fact that a transition to... 

---