{"id":15184,"date":"2019-07-31T00:01:32","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T00:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3dnatives.com\/en\/?p=15184"},"modified":"2019-07-30T13:55:51","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T13:55:51","slug":"magnetic-liquid-droplets-310720194","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3dnatives.com\/en\/magnetic-liquid-droplets-310720194\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists 3D print magnetic liquid droplets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists at Berkeley Lab in the US have made a new material that could lead to 3D printable magnetic liquid devices. Today, many essential technologies rely on magnets made from solid materials – for example, magnetic data storage devices or MRI body scan machines. But what if it were possible to make a magnetic device out of a liquid? This is the aim of this new research that uses 3D printing technologies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This study<\/a> was published on July, 19 in the journal Science. Tom Russel, a visiting faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and professor of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts, led the study and explains, \u201c<\/span>We\u2019ve made a new material that is both <\/span><\/i>liquid and magnetic<\/i><\/b>. No one has ever observed this before. <\/span><\/i>This opens the door to a new area of science in magnetic soft matter<\/span><\/i>.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

First, Tom Russel and Xubo Liu, the study\u2019s lead authors came up with the idea of forming liquid structures from ferrofluids. Ferrofluids are solutions of iron-oxide particles that becomes highly magnetic in the presence of another magnet. Once this observation made, the scientists wondered if they could make the ferrofluids permanently magnetic, behaving like a solid magnet but looking like a liquid. Using a modified 3D printer, the researchers were able to 3D print droplets (1 millimeter in size) from a ferrofluid solution containing iron-oxide nanoparticles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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Credits: Xubo Liu et al.\/Berkeley Lab<\/p><\/div>\n

Thanks to a phenomenon they call \u201cinterfacial jamming\u201d, the nanoparticles were naturally brought at the surface of the droplets. To make them magnetic, the scientists just had to place them next to a magnetic coil in solution. As expected, the magnetic coil pulled the iron-oxide nanoparticles towards it. However, once the magnetic coil was removed, the droplets started gravitating towards one another in perfect unison. They had made permanent liquid magnets, something completely unexpected.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The key of this finding is that the iron-oxide nanoparticles at the surface of the droplet actually form a solid surface around each liquid droplet. There is only 8 nanometers between each of the billion nanoparticles. The researchers also found that the properties of the magnetic droplet didn\u2019t vanish if they divided a droplet into smaller, thinner droplets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n