Attachment and Detachment of Particles from a Surface under Shear Flow

In a recent paper, we described a quantitative analysis of the detachment kinetics of beads adsorbed in a microfluidic system under laminar shear flow. In this paper, we extend this formalism to the kinetics of attachment with concurrent detachment under increasing shear flow, ramped up in a controlled time dependence. The motivation for this work is to provide a theoretical framework or tool that helps experimentalists to extract relevant parameters such as attachment and detachment rates. We also present a graphical method to simplify the extraction of the pre-exponential and activation energies for the attachment and detachment process.