Numerical electrokinetics

A new lattice method is presented in order to efficiently solve the electrokinetic equations, which describe the structure and dynamics of the charge cloud and the flow field surrounding a single charged colloidal sphere, or a fixed array of such objects. We focus on calculating the electrophoretic mobility in the limit of small driving field, and systematically linearize the equations with respect to the latter. This gives rise to several subproblems, each of which is solved by a specialized numerical algorithm. For the total problem we combine these solvers in an iterative procedure. Applying this method, we study the effect of the screening mechanism (salt screening versus counterion screening) on the electrophoretic mobility, and find a weak non-trivial dependence, as expected from scaling theory. Furthermore, we find that the orientation of the charge cloud (i.e. its dipole moment) depends on the value of the colloid charge, as a result of a competition between electrostatic and hydrodynamic effects.