Multiple Particle Manipulation under Dielectrophoresis Effect: Modeling and Experiments

The dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) technique was employed to design multiple microfluidic devices for investigating the motion of bioparticles at low Reynolds numbers. A DPD in-house FORTRAN code was developed to simulate the trajectories of two microparticles in the presence of hydrodynamic and transverse deflecting force fields via considering interparticle interaction forces. The particle-particle interactions were described by using a simplified version of the Morse potential. The transverse deflecting force considered in this microfluidic application was the dielectrophoresis (DEP) force. Multiple microfluidic devices with different configurations of microelectrodes were numerically designed to investigate the dielectrophoretic behavior of bioparticles for their trajectories and the focusing of bioparticles into a single stream in the middle of the microchannel. The DPD simulation results were verified and validated against previously reported numerical and experimental works in the literature. The computationally designed microdevices were fabricated by employing standard lithographic techniques, and experiments were conducted via taking red blood cells as the representative bioparticles. The experimental results for the trajectories and focusing showed good agreement with the numerical results.