Topological design of electrode shapes for dielectrophoresis based devices

This research develops a topology optimization procedure to find out the optimal shapes of electrodes for cell sorter devices based on dielectrophoresis phenomenon which moves dielectrically polarizable particles in the presence of nonuniform electric field. After understanding the working principle of dielectrophoresis based devices mathematically, the spatial distributions of the square electric field is defined as the objective function and it is possible to define an optimization formulation in the framework of the standard topology optimization procedure. To show the potential of the developed procedure, optimized electrodes as well as some illustrative numerical examples are presented.