Frequency effects on interactive motion of dielectrophoretic particles in an AC electrical field

Abstract

Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is one of the popular methods to manipulate bio-particles. Recently DEP particle interaction phenomena in AC electrical fields have attracted growing attention due to their application prospects. Frequency effects on DEP particle interactions in AC electrical fields are investigated by numerical computation based on the Maxwell stress tensor (MST) method and arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) algorithm in this work. The numerical results indicate that behaviors of DEP particle interaction are strongly dependent on the frequency of the AC field. The Maxwell stress on particle surfaces, the time-averaged DEP forces, particle velocities, motion trajectories, particle chain orientation and chain-forming time can be flexibly manipulated via frequency tuning of the AC field.