Predicting and eliminating Joule heating constraints in large dielectrophoretic IDE separators

Dielectrophoresis (DEP), a measure to manipulate motion trajectories of suspended particles, has a high potential for solving difficult particle-liquid separation problems. Applications of DEP so far have been limited to micro-channels and lab-on-a-chip devices. However, for designing DEP separators with sufficiently high throughput to reach preparative scale, an understanding of the interplay of channel geometry and electrode concept with respect to induced particle velocity is required. The objective of tailored design is a control of particle motion trajectories predominantly by DEP while avoiding electrothermal interference. It is Joule heating, which gives rise to temperature gradients in the liquid phase and, thus, induces thermal convection. In this work we demonstrate that a solution of this Joule heating problem in large scale DEP systems is a tailored ratio of electrode diameter, electrode distance, and channel height. Based on model calculations we predicted the influence of both DEP force and drag force through thermal convection on particle trajectories for a case study, a channel with rectangular cross section and an array of cylindrical interdigitated electrodes (IDE) at the bottom. These theoretical results were verified experimentally by measured velocities of polyelectrolytic resin microparticles located at the subsurface of demineralized water. This allowed for a qualitative sensitivity analysis of the impact of voltage input, particle size and medium properties on the critical design parameter. From this, design criteria were deduced for the IDE-DEP system that allow for minimizing the influence of Joule heating. The findings demonstrate that, even if high voltages are applied, Joule heating problems can be effectively suppressed in DEP system scale-up.