Magnetic Liquid in Action

This looks incredible. I would suggest you watch it in wide screen.

magnetic Liquid

It's basically made up of tiny tiny tiny particles of ferromagnetic material.
I thought it looked pretty nice.

What applications would something like this have? I couldn't really imagine any. Perhaps as a distraction you could give someone if your intent was to steal industrial secrets, but even then . . .

Fascinating. Where can I buy this stuff?

It would be interesting to see what applications they come up with for the stuff.

What's with the clapping though?

Wow! Thats great! How does it form those spikes though? I would have thought it would all have come up as one lump :s

That is seriously amazing, and im with GemWolf; I want some!! lol

I'd like to know that as well... Normal iron filings group together like that in a spiky structure when attracted by a magnet.

Its called ferrofluid. You can buy it or make it yourself.

You can buy it here along with lots of other great magnet experimenting materials.

www.forcefieldmagnets.com...

Heres a recipe to make it. chemistry.about.com...

I have seen some cool things done with ferrofluid and electromagnets wired into sound systems. Where the liquid dances to the music

I thought of a possible use for ferrofluid awhile back in a discussion about inflatable space vessels. Someone brought up the use of inflatable buildings being a excellent off planet mining base due to the fact it could be deflated into a small area and moved. With the concerns of radiation shielding away from the earths magnetic field. I thought about the use of ferrofluid as a liquid that could be injected between 2 layers of the inflatable wall and then magnetized . This would block charged radiation and allow the inflatable building to have magnetic radiation shielding. For moving the liquid could be drained and the building deflated and moved to a new area and put back up...


[edit on 14-9-2006 by Heckman]

Since I can't seem to edit my last post... my guess is it forms those shapes from the flux lines.




A piece of paper with iron filings, showing the flux lines. Now if the paper wasn't separating the filings from the magnet, it would bunch together in spiky star shapes, much like the ferrofluid.

There is no reason why you should not be able to edit. You only posted 50 minutes ago.

Yeah, I remember doing the 'iron fillings on paper held over a magnet' experiment But how powerful would the magnets under the ferrofluid have to be!

Nah, I posted my first message in this thread around 12 hours ago... dunno why it won't let me edit. Oh well.

I don't think they'd have to be all too powerful, for the liquid to form those spiky things. From Heckman's second link, "a ferrofluid is about 5% magnetic solids, 10% surfactant, and 85% carrier, by volume." So really, I'd assume it's just like iron filings, only in a viscous liquid holding it all together - sort of like slime made with glue and borax.

I base my iron filing knowledge from grade 6, buggerising around with magnets. Great fun.

Very cool! Ferrofluids have been used in the audio speaker and transducer manufacturing industry for years. This fluid has great heat sinking abilities and is used to coat speaker transducer magnetic coils in order to increase power handling capabilities.

I can't wait to see suspension technology evolve with the introduction of this stuff. Just image a computer controlling magnets with some of that stuff in shock tubes and the poissibilities are only as limited as the software and your imagination

This brings to mind something like an object that you can tuck away into a little box, then apply a magnetic field to it and have the object reappear whenever you want.

This is going a little out there. Wonder if you could "program" a memory of a shape into the particles, and when you apply a magnetic or electrical field to it and springs to life from a blob.

Troy