MIT engineers created a nature inspired tree on a chip

It is possible to create lungs on a chip or a particle accelerator on a chip, then why not a tree? Passive micropumps from MIT don’t resemble a tree very much, but the do work very much like one. They could find application with the creation of microrobots.

Tree and also other plants, whether large or small are essentially natures hydraulic pumps. They usually work in a way that they pump water out of the root up to the furthest leaves and in the other direction sugars made with photosynthesis are being pumped. This never-ending flow of fluids has been working now for millions of years.

Engineers from MIT and their co-workers have been inspired by plants and created an artificial “tree-on-a-chip. The results of their research has been published by Nature Plants recently. It is a micro-fluid device, that imitates the mechanism of pumping in plants. As well as the natures models the tree-on-a-chip works passively. It doesn’t need any moving parts or external pumps. The whole new device is capable of pumping water with a constant speed for days.

What good is a tree-on-a-chip? The co-author of the study Anette Hosoi said that the system made from pasive pumps could work as a simple hydraulic propulsion for microrobots. Previous experience shows that the creation of small parts and pumps for the propulsion systems of small robots is very difficult and very expensive. Technologies of the tree-on-a-chip from MIT might lead to the creation of robots with a new generation of propulsion system that will be made from cheap water pumps.

The goal of the research was to create simple and working complexes, similar to ones found in nature. Whenever a tree wants to create new leaves and connect them to its passive pumps, it does it very easily. But every tends to be very complicated when it comes to small robots. It would be great to have similar construction modules and to create small robotic constructs from them. Hosoi believes that the tree-on-a-chip is step in the right direction.

The tree-on-a-chip from MIT is not really that complicated. But it is still capable of passively pumping water from a reservoir, through the chip and pak to the reservoir with a constant speed for several days. Similar devices were capable of doing that for a maximum of a few minutes. Thus this is a dramatic improvement. The key was in adding a source of sugar that works similarly as the sugar from photosynthesis. Thus we may see microrobots that work for a cube of sugar.

sources
MIT 20. 3. 2017, Nature Plants 3: 17032.