Magnetically Actuated Artificial Microswimmers As Mobile Microparticle Manipulators

Buzhardt, Jake; Tallapragada, Phanindra

doi:10.1115/dscc2019-9015

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 24 publications

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“…Later, Cheang et al [12] showed that such magnetic swimmers composed of beads can be deployed as modular sub-units, assembling and disassembling due to magnetic interactions. Recently the authors showed in simulation that the three-sphere artificial swimmer can be used to manipulate a passive spherical particle using the velocity field generated by the swimmer [20].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of groups of magnetically driven artificial microswimmers

Buzhardt

Tallapragada

2019

Phys. Rev. E

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Magnetically driven artificial microswimmers have the potential to revolutionize many biomedical technologies, such as minimally-invasive microsurgery, micro-particle manipulation, and localized drug delivery. However, many of these applications will require the controlled dynamics of teams of these micro-robots with minimal feedback. In this work, we study the motion and fluid dynamics produced by groups of artificial microswimmers driven by a torque induced through a uniform, rotating magnetic field. Through Stokesian dynamics simulations, we show that the swimmer motion produces a rotational velocity field in the plane orthogonal to the direction of the magnetic field's rotation, which causes two interacting swimmers to move in circular trajectories in this plane around a common center. The resulting over all motion is on a helical trajectory for the swimmers. We compare the highly rotational velocity field of the fluid to the velocity field generated by a rotlet, the point-torque singularity of Stokes flows, showing that this is a reasonable approximation on the time average. Finally, we study the motion of larger groups of swimmers and show that these groups tend to move coherently, especially when swimmer magnetizations are uniform. This coherence is achieved because the group center remains almost constant in the plane orthogonal to the net motion of the swimmers. The results in the paper will prove useful for controlling the ensemble dynamics of small collections of magnetic swimmers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%