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‘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.
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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
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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