Miniaturized mobile microrobots have opened new applications from biomedical to environmental fields. Among various types of microrobots, recent progress on highly performing planar type could offer a good compromise between the manufacturability and functionality promising for practical applications. The remaining challenges are guarantee their sustainable operations in unclean wet environment...

This work reports a flexible sweat-activated battery integrated with efficient bio-inspired microfluidics that can power biosensors for real-time health monitoring.

Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is the movement of a particle in a non-uniform electric field due to the interaction of the particle's dipole and spatial gradient of the electric field. DEP is a subtle solution to manipulate particles and cells at microscale due to its favorable scaling for the reduced size of the system. DEP has been utilized for many applications in microfluidic systems. In this revi...

Microfluidics is very important in the world of BioMEMS, particularly for lab-ona-chip devices. There are many unusual differences from conventional fluidics, such as the significance of surface forces, the high shear/extensional rate, the high heat transfer rate, the low Reynolds number, and the high Weissenberg number. In this study, aqueous solutions of high molecular-weight polymers, polyet...

Surface acoustic waves are used to actuate and process smallest possible amounts of fluids on the planar surface of a piezoelectric chip. Chemical modification of the chip surface is employed to create virtual wells and tubes to confine the liquids. Lithographically modulated wetting properties of the surface define a fluidic network, in analogy to the wiring of an electronic circuit. Acoustic ...

In this paper we briefly review the main issues associated with mixing at the microscale and introduce the papers comprising the Theme Issue.