Hydrodynamic Control via Programmable Magnetic Cilia for Enhanced Microfluidic Mixing in Photodegradation

In recent years, magnetic actuation has been widely explored for achieving programmable flow manipulation in microfluidic systems. n this presented work, vortex-enabled micromixing was achieved through arrays of magnetic artificial cilia engineered with orientational asymmetry. Distinct beating modes such as synchronous, symplectic metachronal, and antiplectic metachronal were programmed via selective magnetization templates. Further, these actuation modes were observed to generate tunable hydrodynamic fields extending beyond conventional planar motion. Among the tested configurations, the inclined antiplectic array was observed to exhibit superior mixing efficiency of 87% and a threefold enhancement in photocatalytic dye degradation compared with aligned controls, highlighting orientationinduced vortices as key drivers for enhanced flow reconfiguration.