Presentazioni e Articoli Tecnici

Dielectrophoresis is a method for cell manipulation in miniaturized devices exploiting the dielectric properties of cells and/or cellular aggregates suspended in a fluid and subjected to a high-gradient electric field. The mathematical expression of the force is obtained by a multipole expansion whose terms involve increasing power of the particle\'s radius.

Three methods for the expression of the dielectrophoretic force are analyzed and compared in terms of accuracy and computational load, depending on the particle’s radius and on the field non-uniformity factor: the dipole approximation, the multipole approximation and the discrete method. The comparison with experiments is performed both in case of single Saccharomyces Cerevisiae yeast cells and of Langerhans islets cellular aggregates and the results agree with the simulations.