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We present a waved microchannel for continuous focusing of microparticles and cells using negative direct current (dc) dielectrophoresis. The waved channel is composed of consecutive s-shaped curved channels in series to generate an electric field gradient required for the dielectrophoretic effect. When particles move electrokinetically through the channel, the experienced negative dielectrophoretic forces alternate directions within two adjacent semicircular microchannels, leading to a focused continuous-flow stream along the channel centerline. Both the experimentally observed and numerically simulated results of the focusing performance are reported, which coincide acceptably in proportion to the specified dimensions (i.e. inlet and outlet of the waved channel). How the applied electric field, particle size and medium concentration affect the performance was studied by focusing polystyrene microparticles of varying sizes. As an application in the field of biology, the focusing of yeast cells in the waved mcirochannel was tested. This waved microchannel shows a great potential for microflow cytometry applications and is expected to be widely used before different processing steps in lab-on-a-chip devices with integrated functions.

A novel shock tube is designed to investigate the nonlinear feature of convergent Richtmyer–Meshkov instability on a single-mode interface formed by a soap film technique. The shock tube employs a concave–oblique–convex wall profile which first transforms a planar shock into a cylindrical arc, then gradually strengthens the cylindrical shock along the oblique wall, and finally converts it back into a planar one. Therefore, the new facility can realize analysis on compressibility and nonlinearity of convergent Richtmyer–Meshkov instability by eliminating the interface deceleration and reshock. Five sinusoidal $\text{air}{-}\text{SF}_{6}$ interfaces with different amplitudes and wavelengths are considered. For all cases, the perturbation amplitude experiences a linear growth much longer than that in the planar geometry. A compressible linear model is derived by considering a constant uniform fluid compression, which shows a slight difference to the incompressible theory. However, both the linear models overestimate the perturbation growth from a very early stage due to the presence of strong nonlinearity. The nonlinear model of Wang et al. (Phys. Plasmas, vol. 22, 2015, 082702) is demonstrated to predict well the amplitude growth up to a normalized time of 1.0. The prolongation of the linear increment is mainly ascribed to the counteraction between the promotion by geometric convergence and the suppression by nonlinearity. Growths of the first three harmonics, obtained by a Fourier analysis of the interface contour, provide a first thorough validation of the nonlinear theory.

G. (2013). Continuous manipulation and separation of particles using combined obstacle-and curvature-induced direct current dielectrophoresis. Electrophoresis, 34 (7), 952-960.Continuous manipulation and separation of particles using combined obstacle-and curvature-induced direct current dielectrophoresis AbstractThis paper presents a novel dielectrophoresis-based microfluidic device incorporating round hurdles within an S-shaped microchannel for continuous manipulation and separation of microparticles. Local nonuniform electric fields are generated due to the combined effects of obstacle and curvature, which in turn induce negative dielectrophoresis forces exerting on the particle that transport throughout the microchannel electrokinetically. Experiments were conducted to demonstrate the controlled trajectories of fix-sized (i.e. 10 or 15x μm) polystyrene particles, and size-dependent separation of 10 and 15 μm particles by adjusting the applied voltages at the inlet and outlets. Numerical simulations were also performed to predict the particle trajectories, which showed reasonable agreement with experimentally observed results. Compared to other microchannel designs that make use of either obstacle or curvature individually for inhomogeneous electric fields, the developed microchannel offers advantages such as improved controllability of particle motion, lower requirement of applied voltage, reduced fouling, and particle adhesion, etc. AbstractThis paper presents a novel dielectrophoresis (DEP)-based microfluidic device incorporating round hurdles within an S-shaped microchannel for continuous manipulation and separation of microparticles. Local nonuniform electric fields are generated due to the combined effects of obstacle and curvature, which in turn induce negative DEP forces exerting on the particle that transport throughout the microchannel electrokinetically. Experiments were conducted to demonstrate the controlled trajectories of fix-sized (i.e. 10 or 15 m) polystyrene (PS) particles, and size-dependent separation of 10 and 15 m particles by adjusting the applied voltages at the inlet and outlets. Numerical simulations were also performed to predict the particle trajectories, which showed reasonable agreement with experimentally observed results. Compared to other microchannel designs that make use of either obstacle or curvature individually for inhomogeneous electric fields, the developed microchannel offers advantages such as improved controllability of particle motion, lower requirement of applied voltage, reduced fouling and particle adhesion, etc.

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As a generation of the classical percolation, clique percolation focuses on the connection of cliques in a graph, where the connection of two k cliques means that they share at least l1 makes a step-function-like discontinuous phase transition in the thermodynamic limit and a continuous phase transition for l=1. More interesting, our analysis shows that at the critical point, the order parameter ϕ(c) for l>1 is neither 0 nor 1, but a constant depending on k and l. All these theoretical findings are in agreement with the simulation results, which give theoretical support and clarification for previous simulation studies of clique percolation.

In this paper, a cellular automaton model of vehicular traffic in Manhattan-like urban system is proposed. In this model, the origin-destination trips and traffic lights have been considered. The system exhibits three different states, i.e., moving state, saturation state and global deadlock state. With a grid coarsening method, vehicle distribution in the moving state and the saturation state has been studied. Interesting structures (e.g., windmill-like one, T-shirt-like one, Y-like one) have been revealed. A metastability of the system is observed in the transition from saturation state to global deadlock state. The effect of advanced traveller information system (ATIS), the traffic light period, and the traffic light switch strategy have also been investigated.

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