Magnetic mixing creates quite a stir

Currently, Martin, Lauren Rohwer, and graduate intern Kyle Solis work with the vortex field mixing, among other projects. Their experimental report, recently appearing in the July issue of Physical Review, has generated interest, including a Physical Review Focus article and a Research Highlight in the September MRS Bulletin.

This type of magnetic mixing with particles that assemble into micro-stir bars isn't like the magnetic mixing done in high school chemistry class.

"In your high school chemistry class," Martin says "when you mixed a beaker of water on a stir plate, underneath the plate was a permanent magnet spinning around to make the stir bar spin. If that hidden magnet suddenly became twice as strong, the magnetic field would double but you wouldn't see any increase in the stirring at all.

"With our process," Martin said "if we make the magnetic field twice as strong, the stirring becomes four times as strong because the stronger field makes the particle chains longer."

With conventional stir-bar mixing you can increase the mixing torque by increasing the speed of the stir bar instead. It's easy to feel this effect by simply holding the beaker slightly above the stir plate. In vortex field mixing increasing the speed of the wobbling doesn't help, because the chains simply break into smaller pieces and the mixing torque doesn't change at all.

Vortex field mixing stirs just as effectively with magnetic nanoparticles as with traditional micrometer-size powders. In fact, excellent mixing torques have been obtained using 100 nanometer particles. This means even the tiniest fluid volumes can be mixed, as well as the largest.

As strange as these effects are, they were initially predicted by Martin in a theory paper published in the January 2009 issue of Physical Review. This paper also explains why a simple rotating magnetic field doesn't induce mixing, and predicts the optimal wobbling angle of the magnetic field.

Vortex field mixing requires only the modest magnetic fields provided by simple wire coils that can be scaled to the size of the fluid cavity. After mixing, a researcher can trap the particles with a permanent magnet, decant the mixed liquid and recycle the particles endlessly.

Microfluids often must be mixed, but scientists have lacked a simple and reliable way to do it. Now, Sandia researcher Jim Martin and his colleagues have developed a new way to mix tiny volumes. Jim calls the approach vortex field mixing.

(Photo Credit: Sandia Labs)

Kyle Solis, a graduate student intern in Nanomaterials Sciences, prepares a sample for mixing using a new approach called vortex field mixing.

(Photo Credit: Photo by Randy Montoya)

Source: DOE/Sandia National Laboratories