Clemson University TigerPrints All Dissertations Dissertations 8-2014 MICROFLUIDIC PARTICLE AND CELL MANIPULATION USING RESERVOIR- BASED DIELECTROPHORESIS Saurin Patel Clemson University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations Part of the Mechanical Engineering Commons Recommended Citation Patel, Saurin, "MICROFLUIDIC PARTICLE AND CELL MANIPULATION USING RESERVOIR-BASED DIELECTROPHORESIS" (2014). All Dissertations. 1323. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/1323 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. MICROFLUIDIC PARTICLE AND CELL MANIPULATION USING RESERVOIR-BASED DIELECTROPHORESIS A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Mechanical Engineering by Saurin H.Patel Aug 2014 Accepted by: Dr. Xiangchun Xuan, Committee Chair Dr. John R. Saylor Dr. Richard S. Miller Dr. Rui Qiao i ABSTRACT Controlled manipulation of synthetic particles and biological cells from a complex mixture is important to a wide range of applications in biology, environmental monitoring, and pharmaceutical industry. In the past two decades microfluidics has evolved to be a very useful tool for particle and cell manipulations in miniaturized devices. A variety of force fields have been demonstrated to control particle and cell motions in microfluidic devices, among which electrokinetic techniques are most often used. However, to date, studies of electrokinetic transport phenomena have been primarily confined within the area of microchannels. Very few works have addressed the electrokinetic particle motion at the reservoir-microchannel junction which acts as the interface between the macro (i.e., reservoir) and the micro (i.e., microchannel) worlds in real microfluidic devices.