Qualitative properties of ionic flows via Poisson-Nernst-Planck systems with Bikerman's local hard-sphere potential: ion size effects (Q321704)

The authors study the dynamics of ionic flows with two ion species via a quasi-one-dimensional steady-state Poisson-Nernst-Planck model for ionic flows through membrane channels with fixed boundary ion concentrations and electric potentials. The obtained model is rewritten into the form of the Dirichlet boundary value problem for singularly perturbed systems and investigated by using geometric singular perturbation theory techniques. The main aims of the paper are: (i) to compare the achieved results with those previously published in the paper [\textit{G. Lin} et al., SIAM J. Appl. Dyn. Syst. 12, No. 3, 1613--1648 (2013; Zbl 1284.34078)]; (ii) to examine ion size effects on individual fluxes that provide detailed information on the interactions among different ion species within the narrow channel. The results provide deeper insight for the numerical and even experimental studies of ionic flows through membrane channels demonstrating extremely rich behaviors of ionic flows and sensitive dependence of flow properties on the model parameters.