Micro-pump with no moving parts

摘要

A pump can propel liquids along millimetre-sized channels at high speeds with no mechanical parts. The pump, designed by Khashayar Khoshmanesh at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia and his colleagues, is a droplet of metal - an alloy of gallium, indium and tin - that is held loosely in a spherical chamber in the middle of a Plexiglas channel. A slow chemical reaction in the metal droplet results in gallate anions diffusing to the droplet's surface. When a low-power electric field is applied, the rearrangement of charges at the droplet's surface causes it to shift in its constrained space in such a way that the surrounding solution flows past it (pictured).