Microfluidic pumping using artificial magnetic cilia

Microsyst Nanoeng. 2018 Jun 4:4:11. doi: 10.1038/s41378-018-0010-9. eCollection 2018.

Abstract

One of the vital functions of naturally occurring cilia is fluid transport. Biological cilia use spatially asymmetric strokes to generate a net fluid flow that can be utilized for feeding, swimming, and other functions. Biomimetic synthetic cilia with similar asymmetric beating can be useful for fluid manipulations in lab-on-chip devices. In this paper, we demonstrate the microfluidic pumping by magnetically actuated synthetic cilia arranged in multi-row arrays. We use a microchannel loop to visualize flow created by the ciliary array and to examine pumping for a range of cilia and microchannel parameters. We show that magnetic cilia can achieve flow rates of up to 11 μl/min with the pressure drop of ~1 Pa. Such magnetic ciliary array can be useful in microfluidic applications requiring rapid and controlled fluid transport.