The Development Of A New Preparative Electrophoresis Apparatus And Separation Simulation Study

Free-Flow Electrophoresis(FFE), as a key branch in area of biological separation analysis technology, has been widely used in the separation, purity, and preparation of nucleic acid, protein, organelle, cell, microbial complex. With the development of genetic engineering, the better separation technology was desired for large sample and high throughout. Unfortunately, the products on market have some drawback, such as: non-ideal cooling, incovenient assemble of separation chamber and exhausting of air, high cost, which hinder its wider application.The new preparative electrophoresis apparatus developed in this paper, having main improvements as follows:(i) insteading of combination of PMMA and cooling water with the integration of high thermal conductivity materials-ceram and semiconductor refrigeration;(ii) two blocks of alloy plates were designed to form the wholly-shaped upper and lower clamping plates, leading to excellent inflexibility of rectangular separation chamber without any leaking of solution;(iii) a simple manual inflator originally used for aeration of balloon was utilized to rapidly remove any air in FFE chamber, inlets and outlets;(v) the cheaper multi-outlets pressure cavity insteading of multi-channel peristaltic pump. The performance of this new apparatus was improved by some test of hydrodynamic and thermal environment, and the reliability was verified by 8 hours separation of acid fuchsin. Furthermore, an optimization method of condiditions was proposed, viz experimential study basing on Joule heating generation in separation chamber. Then, the dyes sample of reactive red 120, amido black and hematoxylin, the proteins sample of bovine serum albumin, cytochrome C, myoglobin, and the cells sample of Streptococcus thermophiles, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Escherichia were separated by the new apparatus with higher performance.At last, based on COMSOL Multiphysics a thermal model was built to study and explore the way of heating dissipation, and another separation model coupling the electric field, temperature field, and flow field was also built to study and optimize the conditions of free flow electrophoresis.