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.

Bio-mimetic metachronal motion can be created in arrays of artificial magnetic cilia actuated by a rotating magnetic field.

We demonstrate magnetically actuated synthetic cilia that exhibit biomimetic asymmetric beating.

Microorganisms use biological cilia to create various kinds of transport, and most important among them is the transport of suspended particles. Biological cilia are shown to effectively capture and trap specific particles for feeding(1–5). Motivated by this, the use of artificial magnetic cilia to capture particles suspended in a fluid is proposed. Perhaps, such nature inspired ciliary capture and isolation of particles can be incorporated in microfluidic lab on chip devices for pre-concentration of cells and analytes. In this paper, the particle capture capabilities of magnetic cilia is demonstrated.