Flows can be driven using metallized surfaces in an electric field. This research area is called “induced charge electrokinetics.” It originated in the world of metal colloids, saw some applications in microfluidics in the 90s, and has seen more intense research over the past 10 years. This paper is a good introduction to flows around metal posts in an electric field.
We can measure ICEO effects with video microscopy to track high speed swirling tracer particles. We can also simulate the effects, and one method is to take a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) package to a small size scale that most tutorials don’t cover. Here is our pdf tutorial with links to videos on using ANSYS Fluent to generate microscale flow fields from a given wall velocity, creating images like the fluid velocity vectors shown in the image above.