Microparticles manipulation based on dielectrophoresis in microsystem

Dielectrophoresis (DEP) has a high potential in the manipulation of low concentration microparticles in microsystem, which is an urgent project. The complex DEP expression was induced based on the basic DEP theory. The main factor of the conventional DEP force and the traveling wave DEP force was analyzed and 2D analytical model with star electrodes as well as parallel electrodes were founded in order to act as the manipulation construction of them. Boundary conditions were set and the real part and imaginary part were coupled to compute the DEP force. The DEP distribution of the two electrodes was simulated numerically in order to obtain the parameters for the experiment. Based on the conventional DEP force, the star electrodes were used to collect microparticles and based on the travelling wave DEP force, the parallel electrodes were used for microparticles lift and directional driving, respectively. Comparing the experimental results with theoretical and simulation analysis, they had a good agreement. The results show that DEP force can be used to manipulate microparticles effectively in microsystem.