Integration Of Acoustophoresis and Dielectrophoresis on A Single Chip Platform: A Numerical Study

Abstract

Passive or active manipulation forces would be needed for the microfluidic system for chemical and biological analysis in order to regulate, trap, separate, sort, and discriminate between particles and cells. The primary goals of passive manipulation are consistency and repeatability to attain high levels of control with exact trajectories. In the meantime, by introducing external forces like hydrodynamic, dielectrophoretic, magnetophoretic, acoustophoretic, and optical tweezing, the active manipulations allow to control particle displacement in a highly predictable and consistent fashion. These methods are much more promising for the development of a small and compact biomedical diagnostic rapid test. Since most biological particles are suspended in different biological fluids like blood and urine, dielectrophoresis (DEP) and acoustophoresis (ACP) have been demonstrated to be promising among these external forces because of their ability to apply forces on the particles in a liquid environment. Additionally, both techniques are fast, inexpensive to fabricate, label-free, and incredibly selective. In this study, we introduce a novel method that combines these two forces into a single chip, improving the separation process for ACP and DEP based on the intrinsic dielectric and acoustic properties of the particles, respectively. It is anticipated that this research would shed light on why particular manipulative factors predominate more or less in particular situations.