Driven transport of particles in 3D ordered porous media

Abstract

Brownian dynamics simulation has been employed to study the behavior of force-driven particle transport in two different types of ordered porous media: (A) interconnected spherical cavities and (B) an array of spherical obstacles, both arranged in simple cubic lattice. The effects of the imposed field strength and direction on the particle mobility and diffusivity are investigated. At a given porosity and imposed field strength, the particle mobility is greater for Case B than for Case A, owing to a higher degree of pore openness for the former. While the normalized mobility always increases with the field strength for Case B, irrespective of the field direction, it decreases for Case A when the field is not aligned with an aperture line. The particle diffusion may become anisotropic and show a nonmonotonic behavior with varying field strength. The diffusivity may increase 10-fold under a field misaligned with an aperture line. © 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.