Modelling and Fabrication of 3-D Carbon-MEMS for Dielectrophoretic Manipulation of Micro/Nanoparticles in Fluids

Carbon-MEMS (C-MEMS) have emerged as a new category of devices for micro/nano technology with many potential applications. Dielectrophoretic manipulation of micro/nanoparticles with C-MEMS is studied in this paper. Through electric field distribution modeling in carbon electrode array, we analyze the strongest simulation effect results of electric field in three dimensional (3-D) surface plots depicting the magnitude of electric field in various cross sections at different heights above the channel floor for 2, 10, 30 and 50 μm high carbon electrodes. It is represented here that maximum intensity of electric field generates with the equality between the height above the channel floor and the height of the electrodes. Simulation parameters involved are for dielectrophoretic manipulation of micro/nano particles based on 3-D C-MEMS. The advantages of using 3-D C-MEMS electrodes over other techniques of creating high-throughput systems for dielectrophoretic manipulation environment surrounded by micro/nano horizons are: (i) complex microscale 3-D electrodes with high-aspect ratios can easily be shaped and patterned using conventional lithography (ii) carbon has a high window of stability thus allowing application of higher voltages (iii) there is no need for bulk micromachining or patterning electrodes on multiple planes (iv) the distance between electrodes can precisely be controlled through the lithography process. FEMLAB 3.4 Multiphysics Modeling software (COMSOL, Stockholm, Sweden) is used for the modeling of electric fields and one-layer C-MEMS microelectrode array was fabricated with SU-8 photoresist.