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A new design for efficient dielectrophoretic separation of cells in a microdevice
Author(s) -
Jubery Talukder Z.,
Dutta Prashanta
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
electrophoresis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.666
H-Index - 158
eISSN - 1522-2683
pISSN - 0173-0835
DOI - 10.1002/elps.201200560
Subject(s) - dielectrophoresis , microfluidics , transverse plane , bottleneck , electric field , electrode , separation (statistics) , materials science , flow (mathematics) , particle (ecology) , nanotechnology , mechanics , optoelectronics , chemistry , physics , computer science , biology , anatomy , quantum mechanics , machine learning , embedded system , ecology
Effectiveness of a continuous biological cell separation device can be improved significantly by increasing the distance among different types of cells. To achieve this, most of the recent dielectrophoresis based continuous separation devices implement differential forces on cells either along the transverse direction or the vertical direction with respect to the bulk fluid flow motion. However, interparticle distance can be increased further by implementing forces along both transverse and vertical planes. In this article, a design for a microfluidic platform has been proposed where a new electrode configuration is identified to implement symmetric forces in both vertical and transverse directions. A numerical model, which considers presence of particles in the electric field and flow field, shows a much higher interparticle distance between red blood cells and plasmodium falciparum infected red blood cells in such a device than that in a conventional separation device. This configuration also reduces the possibility of particle trapping on the electrodes, which is a major bottleneck of dielectrophoresis.