‘Micro-ants’: Tiny conveyor belts for the 21st century
clipped from www.physorg.comA new kind of micro-mobility: Moving tiny particles using magnetic fields (w/ Video)
Alfredo Alexander-Katz, the Toyota Career Development Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and his doctoral student Charles Sing and other researchers, devised a system that uses tiny beads made of polymers with specks of magnetic material in them. With these beads suspended in a liquid, they applied a rotating magnetic field, which caused the beads to spontaneously form short chains which began spinning, creating currents that could then carry along surrounding particles — even particles as much as 100 times larger than the beads themselves.
clipped from web.mit.edu
Chains of superparamagnetic colloidal particles rotate to produce flows on length scales much larger than the chain dimensions, allowing them to behave like "micro-ants" that can move large particles.
Photo - Image: Charles Sing
clipped from web.mit.edu
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- ‘Micro-ants’: Tiny conveyor belts for the 21st century
- A new kind of micro-mobility: Moving tiny particles using magnetic fields (w/ Video)
- New microscopic system could provide method for moving tiny objects inside a microfluidic chip
