Microfluidic pumping using artificial magnetic cilia

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 11μl/min with the pressure drop of~1 Pa.Such magnetic ciliary array can be useful in microfluidic applications requiring rapid and controlled fluid transport.