Winding printed electrode patterns to customize soft fiber pumps

Abstract The increasing demand for adaptable, lightweight, and efficient pump systems in engineering and medical fields highlights the limitations of traditional rigid pumps, which are bulky, noisy, and inflexible. Despite advancements in smart materials and electro-hydrodynamics (EHD), flexible pumps face challenges from structural rigidity and performance constraints. Here, we develop a customizable soft fiber pump (CSFP) that utilizes wound printed flexible electrodes alongside thermoplastic tubes. This innovative approach enables variable electrode configurations, tunable internal diameters, and modifiable cross-sectional geometries, significantly enhancing the pump’s performance and adaptability. The fabrication method yields a compact structure with intergrated electrodes, reconfigurable cross-sections, and flow orientation control. With these features, the CSFP achieves a pressure gradient of 1.39 kPa/cm and a specific flowrate of 160 mL/min/g. These capabilities support its use in soft actuation, conformal thermal management, and redirected flow for impurity separation, demonstrating potential for integration into a broad range of technological and industrial applications.