Investigation of Switching Time and Pressure Head Effects on Hydro Magnetic Micro-Pump and Flow Controller

The significant importance of micro-scaled devices in medicine, lab-on-a-chip, and etc resulted in a vast variety of researches. The idea behind the novel hydro magnetic micropump and flow controller is that ferromagnetic particles, mixed and dispersed in a carrier fluid, can be accumulated and retained at specific sites to form pistons in a micro-tube using some external magnetic field sources along the micro-tube. This external magnetic field is related to some solenoids, which are turned on and off alternatively. Depending upon dragging speed of these pistons, which itself is a function of switching time, this device can be used to either increase (pumping) or decrease (valving) the flow rate of the carrier fluid. In this research the observations of pistons forming process and the related phenomena were investigated for different switching times in a pressure driven flow setup. In the first part of the experiments, the variation of flow rate versus switching time was investigated with nickel particles of less than 10 micron in diameter and (0.25gNi)/(100ccH₂O) concentration in water at the optimum switching mode. In the next part, keeping all the parameters fixed, the effect of the pressure head variation on the flow rate was inspected.