Abstract
Particle separation is important in chemical and biomedical analysis. Among all particle separation approaches, microstructure filtration which based particles size difference has turned into one of the most commonly methods. By controlling the movement of particles, dielectrophoresis has also been widely adopted in particle separation. This work presents a microfluidic device which combines the advantages of microfilters and dielectrophoresis to separate micro-particles and cells. A three-dimensional (3D) model was developed to calculate the distributions of the electric field gradient at the two filter stages. Polystyrene particles with three different sizes were separated by micropillar array structure by applying a 35-Vpp AC voltage at 10 KHz. The blocked particles were pushed off the filters under the negative dielectrophoretic force and drag force. A mixture of Haematococcus pluvialis cells and Bracteacoccus engadinensis cells with different sizes were also successfully separated by this device, which proved that the device can separate both biological samples and polystyrene particles.
Highlights
Microfluidic technology involves the control and manipulation of small amount of fluid confined in micron-sized geometry [1,2]
Particle separation is important in chemical and biomedical analysis [7], and microfluidic techniques have been effective at separating particles
The DEP technology is an electrokinetic transport mechanism driven by polarization [32] that could be a useful tool to control the motion of particles
Summary
Microfluidic technology involves the control and manipulation of small amount of fluid confined in micron-sized geometry [1,2]. Many microfluidic methods have been developed to separate particles [8] using the flow field, microstructure, or forces created by electricity [9], optics [10,11,12,13], acoustics [14,15], magnetics [16,17,18], hydrodynamics [9,19,20], or gravity [20,21]. All filter stages can work at a constant frequency and voltage, by adjusting the geometry parameters of micropillars and ITO electrodes
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