On the effect of surfactant adsorption and viscosity change on apparent slip in hydrophobic microchannels (Q929258)

Summary: Substantial effort has been invested to understand the effect of boundary slippage in microfluidics. However, a satisfactory understanding is still lacking due to extremely precise experiments required. Here, we apply the lattice Boltzmann method to model hydrophobic microchannel flows. We find a possible explanation for experiments observing slip depending on the flow velocity - in contradiction to previous studies. We show that these observations can be explained by not fully developed flow profiles in the channel. Further, we show a decreasing slip length with increasing viscosity and demonstrate the effect of adding surfactant to fluid flow in hydrophobic microchannels.