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.
Highlights
Achieving fluid transport at the microscale is difficult owing to the lack of inertial effects[1,2]
The self-pumping frequency—a metric used to assess the effectiveness of the pump based on its size[27] is estimated to be 0.2/min for this pump
We examine the twodimensional motion of artificial cilia and study the net pumping generated by an array of synchronously actuated cilia
Summary
Achieving fluid transport at the microscale is difficult owing to the lack of inertial effects[1,2]. Researchers have studied flow patterns generated by natural cilia[8,9,10,11,13,14,15] and have shown that ciliary carpets[14,15] are able to produce flow speeds of up 1 mm/s These biological cilia inspire researchers to develop synthetic analogs of cilia capable of performing complex biomimetic functions that could prove to be useful for lab-on-chip microfluidic devices, in vitro and in vivo artificial organs, and drug delivery applications[16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]
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