Articles techniques et présentations

One of the major applications for dielectrophoresis is the selective trapping and fractionation in lab-on-a-chip devices. Nevertheless, many-particle effects due to high concentrations of biological material around electrodes can cause a rapid decrease of trapping efficiency in dielectrophoretic devices.

In this contribution we present a new approach based on a drift-diffusion dynamics to study the particle's behavior near the electrodes surroundings. Within this approach we easily introduce many-particle effects by invoking the effective medium approximation. In this framework electrodes can saturate, losing their capability to attract further particles, thus leading to a more realistic scenario never discussed in past literature.