Study of Laminar Electrohydrodynamic Flows

Abstract

From a physical perspective, electrohydrodynamic (EHD) flow is driven by collisions of neutral molecules with charged species accelerated by an electric field. In modeling, however, this effect can be simplified as a three-way coupling between the Navier-Stokes equations, the charge transport advection-diffusion equation, and Maxwell’s equations. In the context of an electrohydrodynamic flow, this flow acceleration can be used for propulsion, species transport, and shear flow modification. Here, these applications are investigated numerically using several modeling approaches, including the finite volume method, Lattice Boltzmann method, and finite difference method, respectively. Finite volume method is used to model corona discharge phenomenon enabling a direct simulation corona-driven flow. Lattice Boltzmann method is used to model 2D and 3D electroconvection; the numerical code is parallelized and used for GPU computing. Finite difference method adapts a direct Poisson solver, which accelerates the convergence, it is used to model EHD flow in the laminar boundary layer.