Analysis and Simulation of a Planar Microelectrode Structure for Dielectrophoretic Manipulation of a Single Cell and Cell Cluster

In this paper, we proposed a four-electrode microdevice for precise isolating and trapping of a single cell using negative dielectrophoresis (nDEP) forces. To generate appropriate nDEP forces, sinusoidal alternating currents (AC) signals with various phase shifting were applied to the microelectrodes, and the finite element analysis (FEA) techniques were used to analyze the resulted electric field distribution. The simulation results implied that effective trapping and rotation forces can be realized by the proposed device structure under specific excitation condition. The geometry effect on the electric field distributions of electrodes was further studied in details. For the electrodes with 50 μm width, the maximum value of the gradient of the squared field strength could reach 106 V2/m3, which is higher than that for electrodes with 20 μm width. The influences of applied voltage to electric field gradient were also simulated and the result shows that the dielectrophoresis (DEP) force increased significantly with the magnitude of applied voltage. These preliminary results may provide useful insight and design guidelines for the future DEP microstructure design and fabrication.