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Computational modeling of charged species transport has enabled the analysis, design, and optimization of a diverse array of electrochemical and electrokinetic devices. These systems are represented by the Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) equations coupled with the Navier-Stokes (NS) equation. Direct numerical simulation (DNS) to accurately capture the spatio-temporal variation of ion concentration and current flux remains challenging due to the (a) small critical dimension of the diffuse charge layer (DCL), (b) stiff coupling due to fast charge relaxation times, large advective effects, and steep gradients close to boundaries, and (c) complex geometries exhibited by electrochemical devices. In the current study, we address these challenges by presenting a direct numerical simulation framework that incorporates (a) a variational multiscale (VMS) treatment, (b) a block-iterative strategy in conjunction with semi-implicit (for NS) and implicit (for PNP) time integrators, and (c) octree based adaptive mesh refinement. The VMS formulation provides numerical stabilization critical for capturing the electro-convective flows often observed in engineered devices. The block-iterative strategy decouples the difficulty of non-linear coupling between the NS and PNP equations and allows the use of tailored numerical schemes separately for NS and PNP equations. The carefully designed second-order, hybrid implicit methods circumvent the harsh timestep requirements of explicit time steppers, thus enabling simulations over longer time horizons. Finally, the octree-based meshing allows efficient and targeted spatial resolution of the DCL. These features are incorporated into a massively parallel computational framework, enabling the simulation of realistic engineering electrochemical devices. The numerical framework is illustrated using several challenging canonical examples., Comment: Accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Physics, 34 pages, 12 figures

Finite element modeling of charged species transport has enabled analysis, design, and optimization of a diverse array of electrochemical and electrokinetic devices. These systems are represented by the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations coupled with the Navier-Stokes equation, with a key quantity of interest being the current at the system boundaries. Accurately computing the current flux is challenging due to the small critical dimension of the boundary layers (small Debye layer) that require fine mesh resolution at the boundaries. We resolve this challenge by using the Dirichlet-to-Neumanntransformation to weakly impose the Dirichlet conditions for the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations. The results obtained with weakly imposed Dirichlet boundary conditions showed excellent agreement with those obtained when conventional boundary conditions with highly resolved mesh we reemployed. Furthermore, the calculated current flux showed faster mesh convergence using weakly imposed conditions compared to the conventionally imposed Dirichlet boundary conditions. We illustrate the approach on canonical 3D problems that otherwise would have been computationally intractable to solve accurately. This approach substantially reduces the computational cost of model-ing electrochemical systems., Comment: 26 pages, 14 figures