Abstract—Coulter counters are instruments designed to count particles of various shapes and sizes. A significant limitation of the contemporary coulter device is high throughput. In this article, a novel coulter structure is proposed and the change of resistance due to particle translocation is studied numerically. The simulation results show the resistance change affected by the cell size as well as the cell location. The cases when cells stick together and nonstick to translocate in the channel are also analyzed numerically. A coulter device with multiple sensing units is modeled and simulated to investigate the effect of cross-talk between sensing channels. The studies provide useful instructions for the design of solid-state vertical micro Coulter counter for high throughput particles counting and scaling up for a counter array.
Index Terms—micro coulter counter, particle counting, resistance change, size effect.
Jinhong Guo and Yuejun Kang are with the Division of Biomedical Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 70 Nanyang DriveN1.3 ,637457 Singapore (e-mail: jguo002@e.ntu.edu.sg, yuejun.kang@ntu.edu.sg).
Tze Sian Pui, Abdur Rub Abdur Rahman are with A*Star Institute of Microelectronics, 11 Science Park Road, Singapore 117685 (email: puits@ime.a-star.edu.sg, abdurr@ime.a-star.edu.sg).
Cite: Jinhong Guo, Tze Sian Pui, Abdur Rub Abdur Rahman, and Yuejun Kang, "Numerical Investigation of the Performance of Coulter Counter with Novel Structure," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering, vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 885-888, 2012.