Enhancement of electrophoretic mobility of microparticles near a solid wall--experimental verification

Although the existing theories have predicted enhancement of electrophoretic mobility of microparticles near a solid wall, the relevant experimental studies are rare. This is mainly due to difficulties in experimentally controlling and measuring particle-wall separations under dynamic electrophoretic conditions. This paper reports an experimental verification of the enhancement of electrophoretic mobility of a microparticle moving near the wall of a microchannel. This is achieved by balancing dielectrophoretic and lift forces against gravitational force acting on the microparticle so as to control the gap of particle-wall separation. A simple experimental setup is configured and a fabrication method is developed to measure such separation gap. The experiments are conducted for various particle sizes under different electric field strengths. Our experimental results are compared against the available theoretical predictions in the literature.