Premium
Joule heating effects on reservoir‐based dielectrophoresis
Author(s) -
Kale Akshay,
Patel Saurin,
Qian Shizhi,
Hu Guoqing,
Xuan Xiangchun
Publication year - 2014
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.201300343
Subject(s) - dielectrophoresis , joule heating , microchannel , electric field , particle (ecology) , mechanics , materials science , microfluidics , trapping , smoothed particle hydrodynamics , current (fluid) , work (physics) , electrophoresis , chemistry , nanotechnology , physics , thermodynamics , composite material , chromatography , oceanography , quantum mechanics , geology , ecology , biology
Reservoir‐based dielectrophoresis (r DEP ) is a recently developed technique that exploits the inherent electric field gradients at a reservoir‐microchannel junction to focus, trap, and sort particles. However, the locally amplified electric field at the junction is likely to induce significant Joule heating effects that are not considered in previous studies. This work investigates experimentally and numerically these effects on particle transport and control in r DEP processes in PDMS / PDMS microchips. It is found that J oule heating effects can reduce r DEP focusing considerably and may even disable r DEP trapping. This is caused by the fluid temperature rise at the reservoir‐microchannel junction, which significantly increases the local particle velocity due to fluid flow and particle electrophoresis while has a weak impact on the particle velocity due to r DEP . The numerical predictions of particle stream width and electric current, which are the respective indicators of r DEP manipulation and fluid temperature, are demonstrated to both match the experimental measurements with a good accuracy.