Effect of insulating posts geometry on particle manipulation in insulator based dielectrophoretic devices

In this study, the effect of the geometry of insulating posts on microparticle trapping in insulator based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) was analyzed. The motivation for this research was to study how to improve particle trapping and enrichment by modifying the shape of insulating posts used in iDEP microdevices, while keeping post spacing constant. Mixtures of inert polystyrene particles were employed for demonstrating the effects of insulator shape on particle capture and enrichment. A series of experiments were carried out using an array of devices with different insulating post shapes. All the different post shapes employed had a width of 200 μm and were arranged in a square array of 250 μm center-to-center, thus, the spacing between posts was 50 μm in all cases. Mathematical modeling with COMSOL Multiphysics was employed to assess the magnitude of electric field gradients achieved with each one of the geometries tested. The results showed that the electric potential required to obtain effective particle trapping and enrichment can be significantly reduced by modifying the geometry of the insulating posts, without having to modify the separation distance between posts, thus, preserving the porosity of the microchannels. The separation of a mixture of 1-μm and 2-μm diameter particles was achieved in the form of dielectropherograms employing two different insulating post geometries (circle and diamond). Concentrated particles were released as peaks from the insulating post arrays where higher peak resolution separation was obtained with the sharper diamond geometry. Concentration enrichment above one order or magnitude was obtained for both particle types in both dielectropherograms. The results demonstrate that more efficient iDEP separations can be achieved at lower applied electric potentials by carefully selecting the geometry of the insulating structures.