Miniaturized Soft Transformable Swimmer for Evironmentally Friendly and Sustainable Fluidic Carrier

Abstract

We developed a magnetically actuated soft transformable microswimmer for an environmentally friendly and sustainable fluidic handling. They are made of the composite mixture of magnetic micro particles and soft UV curable resin. The custom developed manufacturing system allows to program the local magnetizations of each fractional areas with UV light exposure for both the bending motion by magnetic field and the surface microstructuring to minimize surface stiction. The manufacturable device scale ranges from the smallest of 385×702 µm 2 to the largest 2.0×5.5 mm 2 . We demonstrated successful liquid sample handling between droplets or hydrogel substrates showing a great potential to serve as a fluidic carrier for biochemical sample analysis or drug delivery.

Recent Advances in Magnetically Actuated Droplet Manipulation for Biomedical Applications

“…Hence, it is imperative to enhance propulsion robustness and compatibility in both wet and dry environments. Hwang et al [94] designed a magnetically actuated soft, transformable microswimmer for environmentally friendly and sustainable fluidic handling. They are made from a composite blend of magnetic particles and soft UV-curable resin.…”

3D Printed Miniaturized Soft Microswimmer for Multimodal 3D Air-Liquid Navigation and Manipulation

“…Figure 1 shows the design and fabrication of the proposed soft microswimmer. In this work, we miniaturized the millimeter scale soft swimmers [9] to microscale by two-photon 3D nanoprinting (GT+, Nanoscribe GmbH) of PDMS and magnetic layer metallizations (Cr/Ni 10/300 nm). Photosensitive PDMS (IP-PDMS, Nanoscribe) deposited on top of a glass substrate coated with indium-tin-oxide (ITO) layer.…”

“…Therefore, manufacturing scalability is highly demanding. In this work, we miniaturized the conventional millimetric soft swimmers [9] to micro scale soft swimmers by nanoscale 3D printing and consecutive ferromagnetic metal layer deposition by sputtering. As shown in the Figure 4, we fabricated a milli scale soft swimmer and a micro scale soft swimmer.…”

“…This is a promising alternative but the fabricated microstructures based on this method can swim in only liquid environment which limits their potential applications. Millimeter scale soft robots have been developed by on-demand magnetization assisted printing [8] and this has further been extended to be a better fit for liquid/air operation [9]. This work is to further miniaturize the millimeter scale soft swimmers [9] in microscale and also to extend the propulsion in 3D for airliquid navigation by multimodal propulsion combining the magnetic and buoyancy force due to gravity compensation by bubble trap.…”

“…Millimeter scale soft robots have been developed by on-demand magnetization assisted printing [8] and this has further been extended to be a better fit for liquid/air operation [9]. This work is to further miniaturize the millimeter scale soft swimmers [9] in microscale and also to extend the propulsion in 3D for airliquid navigation by multimodal propulsion combining the magnetic and buoyancy force due to gravity compensation by bubble trap. In addition, this can separate the motions of multiple soft microswimmers thus selective motion control is possible (Figure 1).…”