Iterative dipole moment method for the interaction of multiple dielectrophoretic particles in an AC electrical field

Dielectrophoresis (DEP) for bio-particle manipulation has been drawing much attention in recent years. The equivalent dipole moment method (EDM) has widely been used to calculate DEP forces on single particle, but this method falls short to describe the interaction between neighboring particles. The Maxwell stress tensor method (MST) is theoretically rigorous for particle interaction, but its complicated numerical computation makes it difficult to implement in practice. In this paper, an iterative dipole moment method (IDM) is presented to investigate the interaction of multiple dielectrophoretic particles in a two-dimensional AC electric field. Without cumbersome numerical computation, the inter-particle forces, the particle trajectories and chain patterns calculated by the IDM method are found to be well consistent with those by the MST method for some published results and experimental observations. Furthermore, it is found that the final stable particle chain patterns strongly depend on the initial configuration of the particle distribution. An arbitrary small disturbance to the particle locations may lead to dramatically different motion trajectories and final particle chains. By tuning the frequency of AC field, the particles can be transformed between positive DEP particles and negative DEP particles, which results in different particle chains as well. (C) 2016 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.