Development, characterization, and demonstration of highly flexible hard magnetic nanocomposite polymers

聚合物正在取代硅和玻璃用于微机电系统（MEMS），微流控芯片实验室（LOC）和微总分析系统（µTAS），原因是低成本，光学透明度和生物相容性。然而，在片上驱动中加入活性材料的困难限制了聚合物基系统的商业成功。采用稀土磁体作动具有大功率、大位移和双向作动的特点。在过去的十年中，微系统工业对制造用于微型设备的稀土硬微磁体非常感兴趣。稀土微磁体在MEMS， RF-MEMS电信，BioMEMS和µTAS中具有许多新的和破坏性的商业微器件的吸引力。然而，其广泛应用的主要障碍是永磁材料与微系统，特别是聚合物基系统的相容性困难。

Polymers are supplanting silicon and glass for use in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), microfluidic lab-on-a-chip (LOC) and micro total analysis systems (µTAS) for reasons of low cost, optical transparency, and biocompatibility. However, difficulties in including active materials for on-chip actuation have limited the commerical success of polymer-based systems. Magnetic actuation employing rare hard earth magnets is capable of high power, large displacement and bi-directional actuation. Over the last decade, there has been much interest among the microsystems industries to fabricate rare earth hard micromagnets for microscale devices. Rare earth micromagnets are attractive for many new and disruptive commercial microdevices in MEMS, RF-MEMS telecommunications, BioMEMS and µTAS. However, the main obstacle to their widespread use has been difficulties with compatibility of permanent magnetic materials with microsystems, especially polymer based systems.