Shape-programmable artificial cilia for microfluidics

Bivas Panigrahi; Vignesh Sahadevan; Chia-Yuan Chen

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2021.103367

Shape-programmable artificial cilia for microfluidics

iScience. 2021 Oct 28;24(12):103367. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.103367. eCollection 2021 Dec 17.

Authors

Bivas Panigrahi¹, Vignesh Sahadevan², Chia-Yuan Chen²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Refrigeration, Air Conditioning and Energy Engineering, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung 411, Taiwan.
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1 University Road, Tainan 701, Taiwan.

Abstract

The artificial ciliary motion has been known not to be hydrodynamically optimal, limiting their associated applications in the microscale flow domain. One of the major hurdles of contemporary artificial cilia is its structural rigidity, which restricts their flexibility. To address this issue, this work proposed a shape-programmable artificial cilia design with distinctive polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and magnetic segments distributed throughout the structure, which provided precise control for time-spatial modulation of the whole artificial cilia structure under external magnetic actuation. For the fabrication of the proposed multi-segment artificial cilia, a facile microfabrication process with stepwise mold blocking followed by the PDMS and magnetic composite casting was adopted. The hydrodynamic analysis further elucidated that the proposed artificial cilia beating induced significant flow disturbance within the flow field, and the associated application was demonstrated through an efficient mixing operation.

Keywords: Fluidics; Magnetic materials; Materials in biotechnology.