# Eelectrokinetic turbulence and chaos in ionic migration and in microfluidic convection

## TL;DR

This paper investigates turbulence in ionic migration and microfluidic convection under low-frequency electric fields, revealing stretched exponential power spectra and the influence of external forcing on turbulence characteristics.

## Contribution

It introduces a distributed chaos approach to analyze electrokinetic turbulence and demonstrates the tuning of chaos to external electric field frequencies.

## Key findings

- Turbulent power spectra follow a stretched exponential form.
- Distributed chaos is influenced by the external electric field frequency.
- Microfluidic convection exhibits large-scale coherent structures.

## Abstract

Turbulence in the ionic migration and in the microfluidic electro-hydrodynamic convection (mixing) under constant and low-frequency external electric field has been studied using distributed chaos approach and notion of effective (turbulent) diffusivity. Results of corresponding laboratory experiments have been also used for this purpose. It is shown that for the migration and convection (mixing) under constant and low-frequency external electric field the turbulent power spectra have stretched exponential form $E(k) \propto \exp-(k/k_{\beta})^{2/3}$. In the case of the microfluidic convection the distributed chaos is tuned to the large-scale coherent structures generated by the low-frequency oscillating external electric field ( $k_{\beta}$ is proportional to the forcing frequency).