Characterization Of The Electrodes Of DEP-Based Micro-Separator

In recent years, advances in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices has led to separation, sorting and manipulation of cells and particles on miniaturized devices. Among the different mechanisms that have been used in this regard, dielectrophoresis (DEP) offers high controllability on the particles, provides high throughput, and is tunable. Due to these advantages, DEP is used in this paper for the design of a micro-separator. To optimize the geometry of such a separator, COMSOL Multiphysics® is used to simulate the electric field with the goal of achieving the highest performance in cell separation. For a DEP-based micro-separator, two inclined rectangle planar electrodes are considered. The effect of the width of each one of these electrodes as well as the gap between them on the DEP force is investigated to find the optimum design.