Numerical Study of Particle-Particle Interactions in Lab-on-a-Chip Devices Based on Dielectrophoresis

One of the major applications of the dielectrophoresis is selective trapping and fractionation in lab-on-a-chip devices. Nevertheless, many-particles effects due to high concentration of biological material around electrodes can cause a rapid decrease of trapping efficiency in dielectrophoretic devices. Within this approach, based on drift-diffusion dynamics, we introduce many-particles effects by invoking the effective medium approximation, electrodes can saturate losing their capability to attract further particles and thus leading to a more realistic scenario never shown in past literature. Moreover in this framework, once some reaction terms are introduced, particle stitching in a dielectrophoretic trap can be studied as well, leading to a very efficient tool to describe particle-chains formation due to dipole-dipole interaction. In this paper an application of the model will be presented on a 2D dielectrophoretic trap.