Thesis
A numerical study of microfluidic devices coupled with dielectrophoresis for overlapping size cell separation
Washington State University
Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
05/2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000000063
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/111585
Abstract
Separation of pure population of cells from complex and heterogeneous cell mixtures has
immense application on therapeutics and diagnostics of diseases. Chinese hamster ovary (CHO)
cell in its viable form is the most widely used mammalian cell line for commercial production of
therapeutic protein. On the other hand, Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are proven elements to have
significant prognostic, diagnostic, and clinical values in early-stage cancer detection. Thus,
separation of nonviable CHO cells from suspending medium is critical in biopharmaceutical
sectors and isolation of CTCs from peripheral blood for proper drug innovation in medical sectors.
Passive microfluidic techniques, which can use the geometry to utilize intrinsic fluidic forces to
separate different sized cells, are getting attention as a high-throughput microchip technique.
Despite extensive performance to separate different size cells, this technique suffers when
similarity of size between cells of specific types of CTCs and WBCs or viable and non-viable
CHO cells are present. On the other hand, an active technique, i.e., dielectrophoresis, lacks the
desired high throughput. Here, two different hybrid microfluidic techniques, one with Deterministic Lateral Displacement (DLD) and another with inertial microfluidics, are tested with
CTC and CHO. First, we demonstrated that a DLD device could be combined with a frequencybased AC electric field to perform high-resolution continuous separation of nonviable CHO cells
from the viable cells. This coupled DLD-DEP device's behavior is further investigated by
employing numerical simulation to check the effect of geometrical parameters of the DLD arrays,
velocities of the flow field, and required applied voltages. In the following work, we proposed a
hybrid technique that combines inertia microfluidics and dielectrophoresis in order to separate
CTCs from overlapping size WBCs through the use of a sheath flow. The cell trajectories along
with fluid fields are modeled to investigate the effects of different applied electrical voltages and
Reynold numbers on separation characteristics. This technique could be exploited to design a
microchip for continuous separation for any cell beads, controlled simply by adjusting the external
field frequency
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Details
- Title
- A numerical study of microfluidic devices coupled with dielectrophoresis for overlapping size cell separation
- Creators
- Mohammed Khan
- Contributors
- XIAOLIN CHEN (Degree Supervisor) - Washington State University, Engineering and Computer Science (VANC), School ofJONG HOON KIM (Committee Member) - Washington State University, Engineering and Computer Science (VANC), School ofHUA TAN (Committee Member) - Washington State University, Engineering and Computer Science (VANC), School of
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Engineering and Computer Science (VANC), School of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Science (MS), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Format
- pdf
- Number of pages
- 83
- Identifiers
- 99900587063501842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis