  In the present study we investigate electrostatic stabilization mechanisms
acting on stratified fluids. Electric fields have been shown to control and
even suppress the Rayleigh-Taylor instability when a heavy fluid lies above
lighter fluid. From a different perspective, similar techniques can also be
used to generate interfacial dynamics in otherwise stable systems. We aim to
identify active control protocols in confined geometries that induce time
dependent flows in small scale devices without having moving parts. This effect
has numerous applications, ranging from mixing phenomena to electric
lithography. Two-dimensional computations are carried out and several such
protocols are described. We present computational fluid dynamics videos with
different underlying mixing strategies, which show promising results.
