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1. Introduction
The dielectrophoretic force (F DEP ) is created when the motion of an electrically polarizable particle are stimulated by the electric field gradient (Pethig, 2010; Pethig et al. , 2010; Khoshmanesh et al. , 2011; Honegger et al. , 2013). In a non-uniform electric field, unequal coulomb forces creates net force on the particles (Khoshmanesh et al. , 2010). Under this condition, particles are attracted or repelled from microelectrodes depend on the polarization properties of the matter. Several researchers have already investigated dielectrophoretic (DEP) application of microelectrodes for trapping and manipulation of different particles in various medium (Hughes, 2002; Manaresi et al. , 2003; Gonzalez et al. , 2009; Kang et al. , 2009; Iliescu et al. , 2010; Honegger and Peyrade, 2013; Wagner et al. , 2014); however, the handling of micro- and nano-size level is an important course of action that requires further exploration for advanced DEP applications.
Furthermore, integrating DEP into a lab-on-chip allows the manipulation and characterization of particles and living cells, which is one of the huge interests from various clusters such as physics, chemistry, life science and engineering. The capability to characterize and manipulate particles and cells in suspending medium via contactless methods enables autonomous DEP lab-on-chip device, for example, in tumor cell and cell separation application. There has been a remarkable body of work reported on the development of DEP platform (Pohl et al. , 1978; Gascoyne et al. , 2004; Hoettges, 2010; Gupta et al. , 2012; Shim et al. , 2013a; 2013b). According to the configuration of microelectrodes, Khoshmanesh et al. (2011) classified the DEP devices as following: parallel or interdigitated (Yang et al. , 2006; Crews et al. , 2007), castellated (Choi et al. , 2008; Zhang et al. , 2009), curved (Khoshmanesh et al. , 2009; Khoshmanesh et al. , 2010), quadrupole matrix (Hunt et al. , 2008), extruded (Iliescu et al. , 2008), insulator-based or electrode-less (Cho et al. , 2009) and contactless (Shafiee et al. , 2009, 2010).
However, fewer considerations are given to discover microelectrode arrangement effects. Thus, in this paper, the main objective is to increase the performances of two-pole microelectrode arrays via creating a stronger F DEP . The generation of optimal non-uniform electric field in...