Resumen de Analysis and numerical simulation of eloctrokinetic models for the evolution of charged droplets
The purpose of this thesis is to develop tools to study some problems in the intersection between microfluidics and electrokinetics. In this introduction we provide an overview of this areas and introduce the specific problem that we will be dealing with: the evolution of charged drops of ionic solutions.
1.1 Motivation Electrified droplets are present in thunderstorms clouds [20] as well as in technological applications such as electrospraying [8] (used, for instance, to produce small samples of ionic solutions suitable for spectrometry, an application that deserved the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry by J. Fenn), microencapsulation [48], ink-jet printing [53], Field Emission Electric Propulsion (FEEP) thrusters [68], Electronic paper [40], microfluidic chips [21], [18], [29], [65], etc.In order to translate concepts into practical devices, we must learn to control fluids with great precision and speed at, sometimes, ultra small scales. About charged fluid droplets, it is known that they become unstable when charged beyond a number called the Rayleigh limit, and then they develop singularities (cf [6], [7] and [20] for experimental results and [26],
