Ferrofluid Friday

Submitted by LabGrab on December 18, 2009 - 9:43am

Some videos, photos and history on ferrofluids. The company history of Ferrotec, which used to be Ferrofluidics Corp. states "Magnetic fluids, or ferrofluids, were developed in the 1960's through the sponsorship of NASA, to address the unique requirements of moving liquid fuel in a gravity-free outerspace environment. Recognizing the potential for commercial applications using ferrofluids, Ferrofluidics Corporation was founded in 1968."

I also found this reference from 1979 "A Lewis Research Center development called ferrofluids is licensed to Ferrofluidics Corp., which grew to be a multimillion-dollar company in its first ten years, making it one of the most successful NASA spinoffs in history.

The oldest ferrofluid patent I found shows General Electric Company, (GE) as the assignee, and was filed in 1981. It claims that they invented a ferrofluid (fluid containing dispersed magnetic particles), "wherein said metallic particles range in size from about 25 Angstroms (2.5 nm) to about 100 Angstroms (10 nm)." 1 angstrom is equal to 0.1 nanometers. As the video below "Ferrofluid: How it works" cleverly explains, a surfactant is inserted between the iron oxide particles and the oil molecules to create a magnetic liquid.

Again from the GE patent "ferrofluids are expensive. They are produced by either grinding ferrites in the carrier fluid, with a surfactant for coating, for long times, up to 1000 hours, or by co-precipitating the ferrite particles in an aqueous solution and then coating and transferring them to a non-aqueous solution if required."

Used everywhere as an industrial lubricant in motors, disk drives, semi-conductors, and speaker coolants, ferrofluid has in the past few years become a video phenomena. Check out these three below. Some art and some explanation of ferrofluid. Also check out the flickr pics and google trends links at the bottom of this post. Have a great weekend.