Design of Bipolar Pulse Generator for Biomedical Applications

Electric pulse field methods are powerful tools for cell characterization and manipulation and are wildly used in biotechnology and medical applications. A pulse generator (PG) is the device which provides the desired electric pulse field. In this paper, a low cost AC-powered bipolar PG (AC-BPG), directly powered by normal AC power (i.e., utility power), is proposed. Since there is no high-voltage DC power supply in the proposed AC-BPG, the circuit complexity and cost is effectively reduced. Furthermore, the voltage of the generated bipolar pulse of the AC-BPG can easily be controlled to match specific applications. This function is not easy to be implemented in conventional pulse generators after a fixed high-voltage DC power supply is selected. In order to assess the performance of the proposed AC-BPG, a prototype is designed, realized and tested. Experimental results show that the AC-BPG can actually generate a 0-1,300 V pulse with 56 mus duration, without overshoot and ringing. Using a 1-4 mm standard commercial cuvette, the AC-BPG can provide electric pulse fields of 0-13 kV/cm to be used in bioelectronics, medical and industrial applications