Advective superdiffusion in superhydrophobic microchannels

Abstract

We consider pressure-driven flows in wide microchannels, and discuss how a transverse shear, generated by misaligned superhydrophobic walls, impacts cross-sectional spreading of Brownian particles. We show that such a transverse shear can induce an advective superdiffusion, which strongly enhances dispersion of particles compared to a normal diffusion, and that maximal cross-sectional spreading corresponds to a crossover between its subballistic and superballistic regimes. This allows us to argue that an advective superdiffusion can be used for boosting dispersion of particles at smaller Peclet numbers compared to known concepts of passive microfluidic mixing. This implies that our superdiffusion scenario allows one efficient mixing of much smaller particles or using much thinner microchannels than methods, which are currently being exploited.