Simulation Guided Microfluidic Design for Multitarget Separation Using Dielectrophoretic Principle

Microfluidic technologies have emerged as a potential tool for point of care — diagnostics and therapeutics applications. Isolation of multi-targets (Cancer cells along with platelets, red blood cells (RBCs), white blood cells (WBCs), and antigen-presenting cells (APCs)) simultaneously is of great interest in drug discovery and medical diagnosis. By utilizing dielectrophoresis (DEP) effect inside the micro channel, several attempts were made to separate binary mixtures by precisely controlling and manipulating the motion of the particles. However, all of these methods limit its applicability for multi-target particle separation in a single run. In this paper, we attempt to develop a simulation model with novel electrode arrangements to isolate multiple particles using negative DEP. Our proposed model establishes criteria for separating micron-sized particle mixtures (3µm, 7µm, 15µm, 20µm, 25µm) with various electrode shapes, electrode potentials, inlet velocities, and channel widths. The device efficiency was evaluated for a triangular electrode, square-shaped electrode, and rectangular electrode under various practical design constraints. Our study demonstrates an optimum solution for effective separation of particle mixtures using triangular electrode arrangements (utilizing less voltage) and a wider channel of 300µm width that eventually avoid channel clogging issues due to cells inside main channel and collection channels. While evaluating the separation efficiency of the proposed design, we observe that platelets, RBCs, WBCs, APCs, and CTCs experienced distinct DEP force on each, allowing them to collect in different collection outlets without any cross-mixing. Hence our proposed design allows flexibility to the researchers working on DEP by using a wider channel with triangular electrode arrangements enabling them to fabricate the device under resource-limited constraints.