Numerical study on dielectrophoretic manipulation of nanoparticles in

fluid media

Mihai Lungu, Adrian Neculae and Madalin Bunoiu

Physics Faculty, West University of Timisoara, Bd. V. Parvan 4 Timisoara

Email: lmihai@physics.uvt.ro

Abstract
This paper deals with manipulation of a suspension of nanoparticles in fluid media under
dielectrophoresis. This research field received considerable interest in the last two decades,
due to the increasing presence of nanoparticles in circumambience and their high toxic effect.
The dielectrophoretic (DEP) force produced by the nonuniform electric field acts on the
suspended nanoparticles in a fluid medium inducing spatial movement, depending on the
dielectric properties of the particles and the surrounding medium. The electrical field
distribution, the DEP force and the concentration profile in a DEP-based separation micro
system consisting of a micro channel are numerically investigated using a code based on the
finite element technique. The analysis confirms the potential applications of DEP in
manipulation and trapping of submicron particles.

Keywords: nanometric particles, manipulation, dielectrophoresis, numerical analysis.

1. Introduction
Nanosized particles have received considerable interest in the last two decades.
Owing to the industrial development, the nanoparticles became an extremely useful
technological product, but, in the same time, there are important cautions needed in their
manipulation. Their toxicity for human health is relatively high because they can readily
enter the human body through inhalation and have a large specific surface area. Their
filtration is an important technological challenge, as they are produced in large numbers
from material synthesis and combustion emission [1,2]. In many scientific and technical
areas, a considerable interest is also shown to the separation of nanoparticles in accordance
with their physical or chemical characteristics [3,4].
Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a phenomenon in which in spatially non-uniform AC or
DC electric fields, dielectric particles move as a consequence of the interaction of the
dipole induced in the particle and the applied field gradient [2,5]. In the presence of a
spatially non-uniform electric field, the dipole moment induced within the particle results
in a translational force and the dielectric spherical particle undergoes a DEP motion. This
force does not require the particle to be charged, the strength of the force depends
strongly on the medium and particles' electrical properties, on the particles' shape and
size, as well as on the frequency of the electric field. Since the relative dielectric
polarization (and hence the dielectric response) of the nanoparticles depends on the
driving frequency of the applied electric field, an alternating (AC) electric field is usually
applied to generate DEP forces of different magnitudes and directions. Particles are
attracted to regions of stronger electric field when their permittivity εp exceeds that of
suspension medium εm (positive DEP), and are repelled from regions of stronger
electric field when ε p < ε m (negative DEP).
The aim of the present paper is to numerically investigate the behavior of a
suspension of submicron particles under the action of dielectrophoretic force in a 2-D
separation micro-system consisting of a micro-channel controlled with an interdigitated
electrode array, in order to reveal the potential of dielectrophoresis for novel applications
in the field of nanoparticles manipulation.

2. Theoretical background
In order to determine the electric field and the dielectrophoretic forces, the
electrical potential is solved for a defined space and set of boundary conditions (that
represent the electrode array). In this paper phasor notation will be used, with an arbitrary
potential oscillating at frequency ω defined as [4]:
~
V ( x , t ) = Re{ V ( x )e jωt } (1)

where j =(−1)1 / 2 , x is the coordinate, Re{} indicates the real part and the tilde indicates
~
the phasor V =VR + jV I , with VR and VI the real and imaginary part of the electrical
~
potential. The electric field is given by E( x , t ) = Re{ E( x )e jωt } , where
~ ~
E =− ∇V =− ∇ (VR + jV I ) is the corresponding phasor. For a homogeneous medium,
the potentials satisfy the Laplace’s equations:

∇2VR = 0 and ∇2VI = 0 . (2)

The dielectrophoretic force can be written as [3,5]:

~
~ ⋅∇)E
FDEP = ( p (3)
~(ω)
where p is the induced dipole moment of the particle placed in an non-uniform
field. For a homogeneous dielectric sphere, the induced dipole moment is given by:
~
~ (ω) = 4πa 3ε k (ω) E
p m (4)

where a is the particle radius and k (ω) the Clausius–Mossotti factor given by [2,6,7]:

ε~p − ε~m
k (ω) = ~ (5)
ε p + 2ε~m
~ ~
with ε p and ε m the absolute complex permittivity of the particle and the
medium, respectively. The complex permittivity is ε~ = ε − j σ / ω, where ε is the
electric permittivity and σ the conductivity of the dielectric. The time averaged DEP
force is given by [4,7,8]:
2
FDEP = 2πa 3εm Re{ k (ω) }∇E rms (6)
 where ∇E rms 2 is the gradient of the square of the root mean square electric field.
This theoretical result suggests that the dielectrophoresis can be used as an effective
method for separating particles, solely according to their dielectric properties and sizes.
When the sign of Re{k} is positive, the particle is more polarizable than its surrounding
medium and it undergoes what is known as positive dielectrophoresis (pDEP), the force
vector being directed along the gradient of electric field. In this case, the net movement
of particles is oriented towards regions of highest field strength, whereas particles with
polarizability less than that of the medium move towards the region of lowest field
gradient. The last situation occurs when Re{k} is negative, the phenomenon being known
as negative dielectrophoresis (nDEP). Because the particle’s polarization is frequency
dependent, the net force is also frequency dependent. Dielectrophoresis techniques work
for both AC and DC excitations of the electric field.
In the following, the two components of the force will be considered separately for
ease of reference and will be referred to as the DEP and twDEP components of the force.
Inserting the expressions for the phasors, the time-averaged force (6) can be expressed as
[2,9,10]:
(
FDEP = 2πa 3εm Re{ k (ω) }∇ ∇VR + ∇VI ,
2 2
) (7)

for an AC electric field with a spatially varying magnitude but not in phase, and:

FtwDEP = −4πa 3ε m Im{ k (ω) }( ∇ × ( ∇VR ×∇V I ) ) , (8)

for the case of the spatial variation in phase, the so-called traveling wave DEP.
In case of traveling wave dielectrophoresis, the real part of Clausius-Mossotti factor
gives the DEP forces in the vertical direction, while the imaginary part gives the twDEP
forces in the horizontal plane.
The macroscopic dielectrophoretic behavior of a suspension of spherical particles in a
dense and viscous fluid can be simulated by using instead of equation (7) an imposed
non-uniform external force F, as proposed in [3,8,11]:

F = ( k ′cosh by , sinh by , 0 ) , (7)

where k ′ is dimensionless parameter related to the Clausius-Mossotti factor given by
equation (5), b is the dimensionless wave number, and y is the vertical coordinate.
If both the size of the particles and the volume fraction of particles are small, the
dynamics of the two-phase system can be expressed in terms of dimensionless variables
by the following equations [3,5,7]:
v = u + QS F ,
∂ϕ
+ ∇ ⋅ j = 0 , j = ϕ v − ∇ϕ . (8)
∂t
where u and v are the fluid and particle velocities, respectively, ϕ the volume
fraction of particles, j the particle flux and the parameter QS is a measure of the intensity
of the external field.

3. Numerical results
 The proposed model describes the behavior of a suspension of spherical particles in a
dense and viscous fluid, subject to an imposed non-uniform external force. Our numerical
study deals with two important aspects of the dielectrophoresis: first we investigated the
dielectrophoretic and traveling wave forces for an interdigitated electrode array [11-13]
and then we computed the stationary flow patterns and concentration profiles for a typical
DEP electrode array as presented in figure 1, where we noted with d the electrode width,
l the distance between two adjacent electrodes, and h the dielectrophoretic chamber
height.
All the numerical simulations were performed using a finite element code, FreeFEM+
+ [14]. The validation procedure, based on a comparison between our results and those
published in [3,5], is described in [8].

Figure 1: Schematic of the DEP patterning chamber with interdigitated bar

electrodes at bottom surface used for dielectrophoretic separation devices and traveling
wave dielectrophoresis. The electrodes are connected in phase sequence.

For the computation of the dielectrophoretic force, we solved the Laplace’s equation for
the real and imaginary components of the potential, together with the associated
boundary conditions. Due to the symmetry of the problem and considering the electrodes
long compared to their width, the problem can be considered to be two dimensional. The
computational domain and the boundary conditions can be assumed as shown in Figure 2
[3,5,8], where the particular case l=d and h>>d was considered.
The vertical lines mark the period over which the system repeats. Also shown are the
values for the potential on each electrode. The solid lines indicate this unit cell with a line
of even symmetry on the left and even symmetry on the right and the single half-
electrode required. The dotted lines indicate the images of the unit cell demonstrating that
the problem is completely described.
Figure 2: A schematic diagram with boundary conditions for the real part VR (DEP case)
and imaginary part VI (twDEP case) of electric potential. The basic unit cell is indicated
by the solid lines.

In order to avoid extreme numbers in numerical calculations, the variables are usually
scaled according to typical values. In this paper, the potential is scaled with V0, the
amplitude of the applied signals, and the distances are scaled with d, the distance between
the center of the electrode and the center of the adjacent gap. In terms of dimensionless
variables V'R=VR/V0, V'I=VI/V0 and displacement x'=x/d, the time-averaged expressions for
the force components are then [6,8,12]:
V 2
( 2
FDEP = 2πa 3ε m Re{k (ω) } 03 ∇′ ∇′VR′ + ∇′V I′
d
2
) (9)
2
V
FtwDEP = −4πa ε m Im{k (ω ) } 03 ( ∇ ′ × ( ∇ ′V R′ × ∇ ′V I′ ) )
3
(10)
d

The simplified boundary conditions require the height h of the solution space to be
much greater than d and were set to 20 in dimensionless units.
The results obtained for the magnitudes of the dimensionless vectors
( 2
∇′ ∇′VR′ + ∇′V I′
2
) ( (
and ∇ ′ × ∇ ′VR′ × ∇ ′V I′ ))
of the dimensionless DEP and
twDEP forces given by equations (9), (10) in 2x2 regions are presented in figures 3 (a)
and (b).
 (a) (b)
Figure 3: Calculated values for the magnitudes of dimensionless vector
( 2
∇′ ∇′VR′ + ∇′V I′
2
) ( ( ))
(a) and respectively ∇ ′ × ∇ ′VR′ × ∇ ′V I′ (b) of the
dimensionless DEP and twDEP forces, plotted on logarithmic scale.

For the simulation of the behavior of a suspension subjected to dielectrophoretic

forces, the system of equations (7) - (8) is solved assuming that the flow is described by a
Poiseuille profile, as sketched in figure 4, with velocity field described by the following
equation:
  2

y
u = 1 −   u max
  2 L  
  
y

where umax is the maximum value of the velocity, reached in the center of the channel, and
2 L y << h .

Figure 4: Poiseuille schematic flow

We considered a simplified computational domain of a two rows system of electrodes

array, in which the electrodes geometry is neglected, as presented in figure 5:
 Figure 5: Two dimensional representation of setup with electrode array and simplified
geometry used in the simulations.

The computations were performed for a set of realistic parameters, as proposed in

[3]: Ki=1, b=3, and QS ranging from -0.7 to 1, in order to describe the attractive (negative
values of QS) and respectively repulsive (positive values of QS) effects for different
intensities of the external field.
The numerical results presented in Figures 6(a) and 6(b), show that the
nanoparticles tend to concentrate to the channel walls (positive DEP) or in the channel
center (negative DEP). By adjusting the applied voltage at the command electrodes, a
mixture of nanoparticles of different sizes can be continuously separated and collected.

(a) (b)
Figure 6: Numerical results regarding stationary flow patterns for (a) positive DEP
and (b) negative DEP (Ki=1, b=3, and QS=±0.2).

The results of a more refined analysis regarding the influence of the external field on
the particles concentration are presented in figure 7.
 Figure 7: Calculated concentration profiles for different intensities of the external field

The distances y=0 and respectively y=1 correspond to the symmetry axis and the upper
wall of the channel, respectively. The case Qs=0 corresponds to the initial distribution of
the dimensionless concentration. The simulations show that in the case of a positive DEP
characterized by Qs=0.1, the concentration increases with 50% near the wall and
diminishes with 30% in the center of the channel. When Qs=0.3, compared to the initial
value, the concentration is more than three times bigger near the wall and eight times
smaller in the center of the channel. In the case of a negative DEP, the effect is opposite:
For Qs=-0.1 the concentration on the wall is 20% smaller than the initial value, while the
concentration in the center of the channel presents an augmentation of 15%. When Qs=-
0.3, the diminishing of the concentration in the vicinity of the wall is 50% and the
increasing in the center of the channel is about 30%. One observes that for the same
module values of the intensities of the external field, |Qs|, the effect of the positive DEP is
stronger.
The accuracy of the computations was verified by assuring that in all the considered cases
the mass conservation is preserved.

4. Conclusions
The paper presents a set of numerical results concerning the description of the
particle behavior in a two-phase system under the action of DEP. The numerical study
deals with two important aspects of DEP: first the computation of the dielectrophoretic
and traveling wave forces; second the computation of the stationary flow patterns and
concentration profiles for a planar electrode array configuration, in a typical system for
experiments on positive and negative DEP. The results clearly show the repulsive and
respectively attractive effects of the dielectrophoretic force on the suspension’s
concentration distribution. By adjusting the applied voltage at the command electrodes, a
mixture of nanoparticles of different sizes can be continuously separated and different
collected. According to these results, DEP seems to be a promising technique for
nanoparticles separation, function of their physical properties (nature, dimensions).
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