Related papers: Microfluidic pumping using artificial magnetic cil…
We formulate and solve the equations governing the dynamics of a microscopic artificial swimmer composed of a head and of a tail made of a thin film of permanent magnetic material. This is a variant of the model swimmer proposed by Dreyfus…
Mechanical forces such as fluid shear have been shown to enhance cell growth and differentiation, but knowledge of their mechanistic effect on cells is limited because the local flow patterns and associated metrics are not precisely known.…
Microfluidics offer remarkable flexibility for in-flow analyte characterization and can even measure the mechanical properties of biological cells through the application of hydrodynamic forces. In this work, we present a new approach to…
Synchronization of actively oscillating organelles such as cilia and flagella facilitates self-propulsion of cells and pumping fluid in low Reynolds number environments. To understand the key mechanism behind synchronization induced by…
Engineering simple, artificial models of living cells allows synthetic biologists to study cellular functions under well-controlled conditions. Reconstituting multicellular behaviors with synthetic cell-mimics is still a challenge because…
Compared to isotropic liquids, orientational order of nematic liquid crystals makes their rheological properties more involved, and thus requires fine control of the flow parameters to govern the orientational patterns. In microfluidic…
Hydrodynamic flows in biological systems are often generated by active chiral processes near or on surfaces. Important examples are beating cilia, force generation in actomyosin networks, and motile bacteria interacting with surfaces. Here…
The manipulation and control of microparticles through non-intrusive methods is pivotal in biomedical applications such as cell sorting and cell focusing. Although several experimental and numerical studies have been dedicated to single…
Recent works demonstrated that fiber arrays may constitue the basis of an open digital microfluidics. Various processes, such as droplet motion, fragmentation, trapping, release, mixing and encapsulation, may be achieved on fiber arrays.…
Biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery, microsurgery, and sensing rely on reaching precise areas within the body in a minimally invasive way. Artificial bacterial flagella (ABFs) have emerged as potential tools for this task…
Droplets are natural candidates for use as microfluidic reactors, if active control of their formation and transport can be achieved. We show here that localized heating from a laser can block the motion of a water-oil interface, acting as…
Fluidic iontronics offer a unique capability for emulating the chemical processes found in neurons. We extract multiple distinct chemically regulated synaptic features from an experimentally accessible conical microfluidic channel carrying…
The encapsulation and co-encapsulation of particles in microfluidic flows is essential in applications related to single-cell analysis and material synthesis. However, the whole encapsulation process is stochastic in nature, and its…
We propose a simple micro-rheology technique to evaluate the viscoelastic properties of complex fluids. The method is based on the use of magnetic wires of a few microns in length submitted to a rotational magnetic field. In this work, the…
We study the formation and dynamics of dipolar rings composed by microscopic ferromagnetic ellipsoids, which self-assemble in water by switching the direction of the applied field. We show how to manipulate these fragile structures and…
The flow profile in a capillary gap and the pumping efficiency of an acoustic micropump employing Surface Acoustic Waves is investigated both experimentally and theoretically. Such ultrasonic surface waves on a piezoelectric substrate…
Free-surface electrokinetic flows have been attracting increasing attention from the research community over recent times, as attributable to their diverse fields of applications ranging from fluid mixing, particle manipulation to…
Strong control over experimental conditions in microfluidic channels provides a unique opportunity to study and optimize membraneless microbial fuel cells (MFCs), particularly with respect to the role of flow. However, improved performance…
Bubble-driven inertial pumps are a novel method of moving liquids through microchannels. We combine high-speed imaging, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and an effective one-dimensional model to study the fundamentals of…
Micromotors pushed by biological entities, like motile bacteria, constitute a fascinating way to convert chemical energy into mechanical work at the micrometer scale. Here we show, by using numerical simulations, that a properly designed…