Light Driving of Hydrogel Microactuator Toward Integration of On-Chip Actuator

Abstract

In this paper, we present driving method of on-chip hydrogel microactuator for a single cell manipulation. The hydrogel actuator is made of temperature responsive gel and fabricated on a microfluidic chip with light absorbing micropatterns. Thus, the actuators can be driven by irradiating light on it and increase its temperature. The advantage of this driving method is it can achieve local heating of the actuator and reducing heat dissipation to substrate and environment. Furthermore, the local heating enables to put the multiple actuators in short distance without unintended actuation of neighbor actuators by heat dissipation. Additionally, heating with light irradiation does not need any wiring on the chip. Therefore, proposed driving method enables to integrate large number of actuators on a chip and independently drive it. This massive integration of large number of on-chip hydrogel microactuators will realize highthroughput and highly functional various single cell manipulations on a microfluidic chip.