Magnetically actuated hydrogel-based capsule microrobots for intravascular targeted drug delivery.

Microrobots for targeted drug delivery in blood vessels have attracted increasing interest from researchers. In this work, hydrogel-based capsule microrobots are used to wrap drugs and deliver drugs in blood vessels. In order to prepare capsule microrobots of different sizes, a triaxial microfluidic chip is designed and built, and the formation mechanism of three flow phases including the plug flow phase, bullet flow phase and droplet phase during the preparation of capsule microrobots is studied. The analysis and simulation results show that the size of the capsule microrobots can be controlled by the flow rate ratio of two phases in the microfluidic chip, and when the flow rate of the outer phase is 20 times that of the inner phase in the microfluidic chip, irregular multicore capsule microrobots can be prepared. On this basis, a three degree of freedom magnetic drive system is developed to drive the capsule microrobots to reach the destination along the predetermined trajectory in the low Reynolds number environment, and the magnetic field performance of the magnetic drive system is simulated and analyzed. Finally, in order to verify the feasibility of targeted drug delivery of the capsule microrobots in the blood vessel, the motion process of the capsule microrobots in the vascular microchannel is simulated, and the relationship between the motion performance of the capsule microrobots and the magnetic field is studied. The experimental results show that the capsule microrobots can reach a speed of 800 µm s-1 at a low frequency of 0.4 Hz. At the same time, the capsule microrobots can reach a peak speed of 3077 µm s-1 and can continuously climb over a 1000 µm high obstacle under a rotating magnetic field of 2.4 Hz and 14.4 mT. Experiments show that the capsule microrobots have excellent drug delivery potential in similar vascular curved channels driven by this system.

Mechanical/Electrical Characterization of ZnO Nanomaterial Based on AFM/Nanomanipulator Embedded in SEM.

ZnO nanomaterials have been widely used in micro/nano devices and structure due to special mechanical/electrical properties, and its characterization is still deficient and challenging. In this paper, ZnO nanomaterials, including nanorod and nanowire are characterized by atomic force microscope (AFM) and nanomanipulator embedded in scanning electron microscope (SEM) respectively, which can manipulate and observe simultaneously, and is efficient and cost effective. Surface morphology and mechanical properties were observed by AFM. Results showed that the average Young's modulus of ZnO nanorods is 1.40 MPa and the average spring rate is 0.08 N/m. Electrical properties were characterized with nanomanipulator, which showed that the ZnO nanomaterial have cut-off characteristics and good schottky contact with the tungsten probes. A two-probe strategy was proposed for piezoelectric property measurement, which is easy to operate and adaptable to multiple nanomaterials. Experiments showed maximum voltage of a single ZnO nanowire is around 0.74 mV. Experiment criteria for ZnO manipulation and characterization were also studied, such as acceleration voltage, operation duration, sample preparation. Our work provides useful references for nanomaterial characterization and also theoretical basis for nanomaterials application.