Surface effects become important in microfluidic setups because the surface to volume ratio becomes large. In such setups the surface roughness is not any longer small compared to the length scale of the system and the wetting properties of the wall
have an important influence on the flow. However, the knowledge about the interplay of surface roughness and hydrophobic fluid-surface interaction is still very limited because these properties cannot be decoupled easily in experiments. We investigate the problem by means of lattice Boltzmann (LB) simulations of rough microchannels with a tunable fluid-wall interaction. We introduce an ``effective no-slip plane at an intermediate position between peaks and valleys of the surface and observe how the position of the wall may change due to surface roughness and hydrophobic interactions. We find that the position of the effective wall, in the case of a Gaussian distributed roughness depends linearly on the width of the distribution. Further we are able to show that roughness creates a non-linear effect on the slip length for hydrophobic boundaries.
Surface roughness becomes relevant if typical length scales of the system are comparable to the scale of the variations as it is the case in microfluidic setups. Here, an apparent boundary slip is often detected which can have its origin in the assum
ption of perfectly smooth boundaries. We investigate the problem by means of lattice Boltzmann (LB) simulations and introduce an ``effective no-slip plane at an intermediate position between peaks and valleys of the surface. Our simulations show good agreement with analytical results for sinusoidal boundaries, but can be extended to arbitrary geometries and experimentally obtained surface data. We find that the detected apparent slip is independent of the detailed boundary shape, but only given by the distribution of surface heights. Further, we show that the slip diverges as the amplitude of the roughness increases.
