The gating effect by thousands of bubble-propelled micromotors in macroscale channels

Self-propelled autonomous nanomotors meet microfluidics

Self-propelled autonomous nano/micromotors are in the forefront of current materials science and technology research. These small machines convert chemical energy from the environment into propulsion, and they can move autonomously in the environment and are capable of chemotaxis or magnetotaxis. They can be used for drug delivery, microsurgeries or environmental remediation. It is of immense interest from a future biomedical application point of view to understand the motion of the nano/micromotors in microfluidic channels. In this minireview, we review the progress on the use of nano/micromotors in microfluidic channels and lab-on-chip devices.

Reconfigurable OR and XOR logic gates based on dual responsive on-off-on micromotors

In this study, we report a hemisphere-like micromotor. Intriguingly, the micromotor exhibits controllable on-off-on motion, which can be actuated by two different external stimuli (UV and NH3). Moreover, the moving direction of the micromotor can be manipulated by the direction in which UV and NH3 are applied. As a result, the motion accelerates when both stimuli are applied in the same direction and decelerates when the application directions are opposite to each other. More interestingly, the dual stimuli responsive micromotor can be utilized as a reconfigurable logic gate with UV and NH3 as the inputs and the motion of the micromotor as the output. By controlling the direction of the external stimuli, OR and XOR dual logic functions can be realized.