Feasibility of multiple micro-particle trapping--a simulation study.

Yanyan Yu,Bernard Chiu,Lei Sun,Weibao Qiu

doi:10.3390/s150304958

Abstract

Both optical tweezers and acoustic tweezers have been demonstrated for trapping small particles in diverse biomedical applications. Compared to the optical tweezers, acoustic tweezers have deeper penetration, lower intensity, and are more useful in light opaque media. These advantages enable the potential utility of acoustic tweezers in biological science. Since the first demonstration of acoustic tweezers, various applications have required the trapping of not only one, but more particles simultaneously in both the axial and lateral direction. In this research, a method is proposed to create multiple trapping patterns, to prove the feasibility of trapping micro-particles. It has potential ability to electronically control the location and movement of the particles in real-time. A multiple-focus acoustic field can be generated by controlling the excitation of the transducer elements. The pressure and intensity of the field are obtained by modeling phased array transducer. Moreover, scattering force and gradient force at various positions are also evaluated to analyze their relative components to the effect of the acoustic tweezers. Besides, the axial and lateral radiation force and the trapping trajectory are computed based on ray acoustic approach. The results obtained demonstrate that the acoustic tweezers are capable of multiple trapping in both the axial and lateral directions.

Highlights

Optical tweezers have been applied to biology and physical research after they were first introduced in 1986 [1], and have been applied in manipulating micro/nano particles such as bacteria, cells, molecular motors, and single molecules [2]
To investigate the acoustic streaming effect on multiple-trapping acoustic tweezers, we introduce the approach studied by Nowicki [25] to estimate the axial streaming velocities
A multiple trapping acoustic tweezers model is proposed in this paper

Summary

Introduction

Optical tweezers have been applied to biology and physical research after they were first introduced in 1986 [1], and have been applied in manipulating micro/nano particles such as bacteria, cells, molecular motors, and single molecules [2]. Optical tweezers have excellent precision as demonstrated in many applications [3], they have several limitations. Optical tweezers are largely limited to transparent media. The trapping ability is significantly reduced in the presence of opaque media, which scatters and attenuates the optical ray on its path to the particles. Optical tweezers are associated with poor penetration in the biotic environment, such as skin and other human tissues. Previous studies [4,5,6] have demonstrated that optical tweezers can cause physiological damage to biological objects due to laser-induced heating

Methods

Results

Conclusion