This paper presents a wireless powered single active finger ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) based microgripper that is operated using external radio-frequency (RF) magnetic field for biological cell manipulation application. A unimorph-like active finger is fabricated by integrating the IPMC actuator to the planar resonant LC receiver and DC rectifier circuits (made of flexible double-sided copper clad polyimide). The finger activated when the device is exposed to the external magnetic field generated by transmitter circuit that matches the resonant frequency of LC receiver circuit, ∼13.6 MHz in magnetic resonant coupling power transfer mechanism. The fabricated prototype shows a maximum IPMC deflection of 0.765 mm (activation force of 0.17 mN) at the RF power of 0.65 W with 3.5 V _DC supplied from the LC receiver circuit. Three repeated ON-OFF wireless activation cycle was performed with the reported cumulative deflection of 0.57 mm. The cumulative deflection was increased to 1.17 mm, 1.19 mm and 1.24 mm for three different samples respectively at 5 V _DC supplied. As a proof of concept, fish egg was used to represent the biological cell manipulation operation. The microgripper successfully gripped the fish egg sample without any damages. The experiments result validates the effectiveness of wireless RF soft microgripper towards the target application.

Conventional electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is widely used for monitoring the fluids flow in a pipeline. As the emergence of microfluidics, the tomography system has been miniaturized and integrated into the microfludic platform for imaging purposes. The on-chip ECT is designed to monitor the permittivity distribution of the micro-platform by integrating the planar electrodes with the sensing region. However, limited research has been reported on the electrode design of on-chip ECT, especially for three-dimensional imaging. Thus, this study investigated the electrode design of an on-chip ECT that is capable for image reconstruction in three-dimensions. Four different electrode configurations with different numbers of electrode and arrangements are investigated by simulation to determine the appropriate configuration for three-dimensional imaging. The electrode dimension is optimized based on the sensitivity distribution using the sensitivity variation parameter (SVP). The simulation results shows that the electrode configuration with dual sensing planes enable three-dimensional imaging. The central electrode of each sensing plane is crucial for restoring a floating object. In experiment, the imaging object that was positioned at different vertical and horizontal locations was reconstructed successfully with an average correlation coefficient of 0.4370 using linear back projection (LBP) algorithm. This work has disclosed the appropriate electrode configuration for the three-dimensional imaging of an on-chip ECT system.

Planar pinch micropump with the integration of two diffuser valve elements has been reported. The fabrication of the micropump is carried out by utilizing simple hot embossing technique for microdiffuser imprinting and spin coating for membrane construction. Parameter of diffuser design is optimized via finite element analysis (FEA). The experiment result shows that the pump works well at low frequency of 29 Hz.

This paper presents an electromagnetically-actuated micropump for microfluidic application. The system comprises two modules; an electromagnetic actuator module and a diffuser module. Fabrication of the diffuser module can be achieved using photolithography process with a master template and a PDMS prepolymer as the structural material. The actuator module consists of two power inductors and two NdFeB permanent magnets placed between the diffuser elements. The choice of this actuation principle merits from low operating voltage (1.5 V_dc) and the flow direction can be controlled by changing the orientation of the magnet vibration. Maximum volumetric flow rate of the fabricated device at zero backpressure is 0.9756 µLs^-1 and 0.4659 µLs^-1 at the hydrostatic backpressure of 10 mmH₂O at 9 Hz of switching speed.