Bistable Current-Pulse-Excited Magnetic Reluctance Microvalve Simulation

There is a great push for lab-on-a-chip technologies to become fully integrated into single stand alone devices. One of the challenges of this integration is to design and fabricate new pump and valve technologies to replace the bulky external pumps that are commonly used. A new valve and pump design, similar in principle to the Vernier hybrid machine, is presented in this paper. The new design incorporates macro scale permanent magnets with micro scale coils to apply force to a magnetic actuator that may be positioned within the fluid channel in a microfluidic system. Numerical analysis of the magnetic fields and resulting translational forces on the actuator are presented.