An analytical solution for thermally fully developed combined pressure - electroosmotically driven flow in microchannels

An analytical solution is presented to study the heat transfer characteristics of the combined pressure - electroosmotically driven flow in planar microchannels. The physical model includes the Joule heating effect to predict the convective heat transfer coefficient in two dimensional microchannels. The velocity field, which is a function of external electrical field, electroosmotic mobility, fluid viscosity and the pressure gradient, is obtained by solving the hydrodynamically fully-developed laminar Navier-Stokes equations considering the electrokinctic body force for low wall zeta potentials. Then, assuming a thermally fully-developed flow, the temperature distribution and the Nusselt number is obtained for a constant wall heat flux boundary condition. The fully-developed temperature profile and the Nusselt number depend on velocity field, channel height, solid/liquid interface properties and the imposed wall heat flux. A parametric study is presented to evaluate the significance of various parameters and in each case, the maximum heat transfer rate is obtained. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.