Analysis of Electroviscous Effect for Flow of Micropolar Fluids in a Nanochannel with Overlapping Electric Double Layers at High Zeta Potential

Flows in nanofluidic channels under the influence of pressure gradient often lead to the overlapping of the electrical double layers (EDLs) augmenting the electroviscous effect. In this work, we analyze the electroviscous effect for the flow of a micropolar fluid in a parallel plate nanochannel, considering EDL overlapping and interfacial slip. Closed-form expressions of EDL potential, velocity, microrotation, yielded streaming potential, and volumetric flow rate are derived semi-analytically for high zeta potential without accounting for the Boltzmann distribution. We observe a significant change in streaming potential with inverse ionic Peclet number (<i>R</i>) for its lower values, and the range of streaming potential is more for thicker EDL. The micropolarity parameter does not have any influence on the streaming potential for weaker EDL overlapping at a lower <i>R</i> value. For thicker EDL, velocity decreases with the micropolarity parameter, while it increases drastically with interfacial slip. However, velocity shows a non-monotonic behavior with interfacial slip and micropolarity parameter for thinner EDL. The microrotation remains invariant with interfacial slip for thicker EDL, whereas its magnitude decreases with slip length for thinner EDL. Although the sensitivity of the flow rate on slip (<i>Q</i>_s^*) increases with <i>R</i> for thicker EDL, the behavior is non-monotonic for thinner EDL. Furthermore, <i>Q</i>_s^* varies non-monotonically with the micropolarity parameter at higher couple stress parameter values and vice versa. In fact, the volumetric flow rate is highly sensitive to slip for thicker EDL overlapping.