Abstract
Many applications in microbiology, biotechnology and clinical medicine require that individual cells can be identified as well as manipulated. Recent advances on the MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) research are helping to offer satisfactory micro-bio-object platforms to further investigate the interactions between micro-objects like beads, proteins and cells. Numerous manipulating techniques have been proposed over the past two decades. Most of these techniques take advantage of the clamping mechanism to achieve the grabbing function via direct contact. Moreover, the manipulating techniques via field variations have also been proposed and further studied lately. Inspired by lobsters’ sniffing behavior, an array of biomimic actuators are proposed in this thesis for micro-particle manipulation in liquid environment. The engineering implementation of this lobster-tiny-hair-like capturing device is achieved by surface micromachining technique. These synthetic tiny-hair-like actuators are actuated via electrostatic force, and drive the micro-objects via disturbing the fluid field. The behind principle is to manipulate the Reynolds number of the surrounding fluid to achieve the function of micro-object manipulation. Numerical simulations and modal analysis are carried out to obtain the design criteria. Diverse designing ideas are employed into our biomimic actuator for not only particles manipulation, but also sorting and trapping. Preliminary experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and functionality of our lobster-sniffing inspired actuator via the micro-object manipulation in liquid environment.