Hydrodynamic separation of cells utilizing insulator-based dielectrophoresis

Manipulation and discrimination of biological cells is essential to many biomedical applications. Insulator-based dielectrophoresis (iDEP) trapping consists of insulating structures which squeeze the electric field in a conductive solution to create a non-uniform electric field. The pattern of insulating structure was designed to generate regions of high-electric field to trap cells with positive dielectrophoresis (e.g., dead mammalian cells at low frequency) in lower-flow-field regions. However, negative-dielectrophoretic cells (e.g., viable cells at low frequency) were repelled toward low-electric-field regions where the velocity was higher. Cells with different dielectrophoretic responses were therefore separated and collected in the outlet. Simulations were numerically performed to investigate parameters of the design in the present study. Furthermore, experiments were also conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of hydrodynamic separation using iDEP in the proposed design.