Dynamic Ion Transport: From Electrolytic Cells to Conical Channels
Authors:   , Barnaveli Alexander 
Published: June 2024

In this thesis we explore the dynamics of ions in electrolytes under the influence of externally applied time-dependent voltage. The thesis is based on three manuscripts.
The first one concerns findings of recent experiments [S. H. Hashemi et al., Physical Review Letters 121, 185504 (2018)], which have shown that a long-ranged steady electric field emerges when applying an oscillating voltage over an electrolyte with unequal mobilities of cations and anions confined between two planar blocking electrodes. To explain this effect we analyse full numerical calculations based on the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations by means of analytically constructed equivalent electric circuits. Surprisingly, the resulting equivalent circuit has two capacitive elements, rather than one, which introduces a new timescale for electrolyte dynamics. We find a good qualitative agreement between the numerical results and our simple analytic model, which shows that the long-range steady electric field emerges from the different charging rates of cations and anions in the electric double layers.
In the second one, building upon the discovery of asymmetric rectified electric fields (AREF) in recent experiments [S.H. Hashemi et al., Physical Review Letters 121, 185504 (2018)], we explore the generation of AREF by applying a sawtooth-like voltage to 1:1 electrolytes with equal diffusion coefficients confined between two planar blocking electrodes. This differs from an earlier approach based on a sinusoidal AC voltage applied to 1:1 electrolytes with unequal diffusion coefficients. By numerically solving the full Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations, we demonstrate that AREF can be generated by a slow rise and a fast drop of the potential (or vice versa), even for electrolytes with equal diffusion coefficients of the cations and anions. We employ an analytically constructed equivalent electric circuit to explain the underlying physical mechanism. Importantly, we find that the strength of AREF can be effectively tuned from zero to its maximal value by only manipulating the time-dependence of the driving voltage, eliminating the necessity to modify the electrolyte composition between experiments. This provides valuable insights to control the manipulation of AREF, which facilitates enhanced applications in diverse electrochemical systems.
Finally, in the third one, we study a hitherto unexploited characteristic feature of emerging iontronic devices for information processing - the intrinsic mobility of the medium (water), containing charge carriers (ions), which therefore not only responds to voltage but also to pressure. Here we study a microfluidic memristor, in the form of a conical channel, exposed to simultaneously applied time-dependent voltage and pressure drops, through numerical solutions of the Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Stokes equations for ion and fluid transport. We show that the channel’s memristive properties can be enhanced, reduced or instantaneously reset by a suitable pressure, and we leverage this finding by two examples of time series processing of simultaneously applied voltage and pressure pulses. We not only show that the distinction between different voltage time series can be improved by enhancing the conductance response with corresponding pressure pulses, but also that the bandwidth of information transfer through the channel can be doubled by letting the pressure pulses represent a second independent time series.