Micro-magnetofluidics in microfluidic systems: A review

Ferrofluids have many traditional applications in the electrical, mechanical and optical fields, including transformers, dampers, imaging systems, and so on. However, in more recent years, the potential provided by ferrofluids to manipulate tiny quantities of liquid by means of external magnetic fields has attracted great interest in the microfluidics domain; resulting in the emergence of a new branch of scientific known as micro-magnetofluidics. This study reviews recent applications of micro-magnetofluidics techniques to six common microfluidic functions, namely micromixing, pumping, focusing, sorting, droplet formation and transfer phenomena. For each function, the fundamental interaction mechanisms between the ferrofluid and the magnetic field are described and the main experimental and numerical results are discussed. Crown Copyright (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.