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Corresponding Author

Khater, Asmaa

Subject Area

Mechanical Power Engineering

Article Type

Original Study

Abstract

Separation of cells is a crucial operation in most of microbiology tests. It is usually preformed using large sized devices (few tens of cm). In this work, cell separation using a microfluidic device based on Deterministic Lateral Displacement (DLD) is considered. DLD is a promising technique having many advantages, including in particular the fact that it can never be clogged. The device is composed of a micro-channel containing an array of obstacles (also called posts) adequately arranged such as to separate cells based on their size. Distances between posts are much larger than separation size, also called critical size, to prevent clogging. Critical size depends on many design parameters. Many successful designs were published. However, the relation between design parameters and critical diameter has never been systematically explored. Design parameters, geometrical and physical, are numerous. Revealing trends through experiments is impractical, since it requires a large number of cases as well as tedious work to discover relations out of obtained data. In this work, the problem is theoretically analyzed in order to understand the effect of different design parameters and to predict, at least to the first order, separation critical size. Numerous trends are revealed, concerning the effect of velocity, as well as different geometrical characteristics including post size and distances between posts. Finally, a correlation is built giving critical size as a function of dimensionless geometrical characteristics.

Keywords

Bio-MEMs; Cell Separation; DLD Design Parameters; Characteristic Separation Diameter

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