Related papers: Microfluidic pumping using artificial magnetic cil…
Cilia and flagella are actively bending slender organelles, performing functions such as motility, feeding and embryonic symmetry breaking. We review the mechanics of viscous-dominated microscale flow, including time-reversal symmetry, drag…
A remarkable variety of organisms use metachronal coordination (i.e., numerous neighboring appendages beating sequentially with a fixed phase lag) to swim or pump fluid. This coordination strategy is used by microorganisms to break symmetry…
Small - but finite - fluid inertia can be leveraged to generate steady flows out of liquid vibrations around an immersed interface. In engineering, external high-frequency drivers (10$^2$-10$^5$ Hz) allow this inertial rectification…
Motile cilia are slender, hair-like cellular appendages that spontaneously oscillate under the action of internal molecular motors and are typically found in dense arrays. These active filaments coordinate their beating to generate…
Motile cilia drive biological fluid transport through whip-like beating motions that synchronize into metachronal waves. The lengths of these cilia span three orders of magnitude, from microns in human airways to millimeters in ctenophores.…
Arrays of H-shape microfluidic channels connecting two different fluidic reservoirs have been built with silicon/SU8 microfabrication technologies utilized in production of thermal inkjet printheads. The fluids are delivered to the channels…
We demonstrate that the ubiquitous laboratory magnetic stirrer provides a simple passive method of magnetic levitation, in which the so-called `flea' levitates indefinitely. We study the onset of levitation and quantify the flea's motion (a…
On surfaces with many motile cilia, beats of the individual cilia coordinate to form metachronal waves. We present a theoretical framework that connects the dynamics of an individual cilium to the collective dynamics of a ciliary carpet via…
In a variety of biological situations, swimming cells have to move through complex fluids. Similarly, mucociliary clearance involves the transport of polymeric fluids by beating cilia. Here, we consider the extent to which complex fluids…
Fluid-suspended microorganisms have evolved different swimming and feeding strategies in order to cope with an environment dominated by viscous effects. For instance ciliated organisms rely on the collective motion of flexible appendices to…
Syringe pumps are widely used biomedical equipment which offer low-cost solutions to drive and control flow through microfluidic chips. However, they have been shown to transmit mechanical oscillations resulting from their stepper motors,…
Propelling microorganisms through fluids and moving fluids along cellular surfaces are essential biological functions accomplished by long, thin structures called motile cilia and flagella, whose regular, oscillatory beating breaks the…
Modern micromanipulation techniques typically involve trapping using electromagnetic, acoustic or flow fields that produce stresses on the trapped particles thereby precluding stress-free manipulations. Here, we show that by employing…
Recent experiments proposed to use confined bacteria in order to generate flows near surfaces. We develop a mathematical and a computational model of this fluid transport using a linear superposition of fundamental flow singularities. The…
Cilia and flagella exhibit regular bending waves that perform mechanical work on the surrounding fluid, to propel cellular swimmers and pump fluids inside organisms. Here, we quantify a force-velocity relationship of the beating flagellum,…
Microelectromagnet devices, a ring trap and a matrix, were developed for the microscopic control of biological systems. The ring trap is a circular Au wire with an insulator on top. The matrix has two arrays of straight Au wires, one array…
Microfluidic chips provide unparalleled control over droplets and jets, which have advanced all natural sciences. However, microfluidic applications could be vastly expanded by increasing the per-channel throughput and directly exploiting…
Ferrofluids kept in place by permanent magnet quadrupoles can act as liquid walls to surround a second non-magnetic inside, resulting in a liquid fluidic channel with diameter size ranging from mm down to less than 10 micrometer. Micro…
Oscillations of flagella and cilia play an important role in biology, which motivates the idea of functional mimicry as part of bio-inspired applications. Nevertheless, it still remains challenging to drive their artificial counterparts to…
Magnetic fields and magnetic materials have promising microfluidic applications. For example, magnetic micro-convection can enhance mixing considerably. However, previous studies have not explained increased effective diffusion during this…