Exact expressions for the mobility and electrophoretic mobility of a weakly charged sphere in a simple electrolyte

Department of Physics and Center for Soft Matter Research, New York University - 4 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA

Received: 5 June 2013
Accepted: 16 December 2013

Abstract

We present (asymptotically) exact expressions for the mobility and electrophoretic mobility of a weakly charged spherical particle in a 1 : 1 electrolyte solution. This is done by analytically solving the electro and hydrodynamic equations governing the electric potential and fluid flow with respect to an electric field and a non-electric force. The resulting formulae are cumbersome, but fully explicit and trivial for computation. In the case of a very small particle compared to the Debye screening length our results reproduce proper limits of the classical Debye and Onsager theories, while in the case of a very large particle we recover, both, the non-monotonous charge dependence discovered by Levich (1958) as well as the scaling estimate given by Long, Viovy, and Ajdari (1996), while adding the previously unknown coefficients and corrections. The main applicability condition of our solution is charge smallness in the sense that screening remains linear.