An electromagnetic system for magnetic microbead´s manipulation

This paper presents the design of a magnetic micromanipulation system for wireless control of a single magnetic bead. Six orthogonally aligned electromagnetic coils were used to generate the magnetic fields for the manipulation and modeling equations were developed to evaluate the required inputs for each coil for precise closed-loop control of the magnetic bead. FEM simulation was performed to analyze the magnetic flux density and magnetic field gradient of the system and the results were compared with the actual measurement. To examine the performance of the proposed system, a super-paramagnetic microbead was placed in a salt medium and experiments were conducted to demonstrate the movements of the bead. The result suggests the ability of manipulating microbeads via the proposed magnetic manipulation system for various micro- and submicrometer scale applications.