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Full-Text Articles in Physics

Electric-Field-Induced Interfacial Instabilities Of A Soft Elastic Membrane Confined Between Viscous Layers, Mohar Dey, Dipankar Bandyopadhyay, Ashutosh Sharma, Shizhi Qian, Sang Woo Joo Jan 2012

Electric-Field-Induced Interfacial Instabilities Of A Soft Elastic Membrane Confined Between Viscous Layers, Mohar Dey, Dipankar Bandyopadhyay, Ashutosh Sharma, Shizhi Qian, Sang Woo Joo

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

We explore the electric-field-induced interfacial instabilities of a trilayer composed of a thin elastic film confined between two viscous layers. A linear stability analysis (LSA) is performed to uncover the growth rate and length scale of the different unstable modes. Application of a normal external electric field on such a configuration can deform the two coupled elastic-viscous interfaces either by an in-phase bending or an antiphase squeezing mode. The bending mode has a long-wave nature, and is present even at a vanishingly small destabilizing field. In contrast, the squeezing mode has finite wave-number characteristics and originates only beyond a threshold …


Microfluidic Separation Of Live And Dead Yeast Cells Using Reservoir-Based Dielectrophoresis, Saurin Patel, Daniel Showers, Pallavi Vedantam, Tzuen-Rong Tzeng, Shizhi Qian, Xiangchun Xuan Jan 2012

Microfluidic Separation Of Live And Dead Yeast Cells Using Reservoir-Based Dielectrophoresis, Saurin Patel, Daniel Showers, Pallavi Vedantam, Tzuen-Rong Tzeng, Shizhi Qian, Xiangchun Xuan

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Separating live and dead cells is critical to the diagnosis of early stage diseases and to the efficacy test of drug screening, etc. This work demonstrates a novel microfluidic approach to dielectrophoretic separation of yeast cells by viability. It exploits the cell dielectrophoresis that is induced by the inherent electric field gradient at the reservoir-microchannel junction to selectively trap dead yeast cells and continuously separate them from live ones right inside the reservoir. This approach is therefore termed reservoir-based dielectrophoresis (rDEP). It has unique advantages as compared to existing dielectrophoretic approaches such as the occupation of zero channel space and …