Scientists 3D print magnetic liquid droplets

Scientists at Berkeley Lab in the US have made a new material that could lead to 3D printable magnetic liquid devices. Today, many essential technologies rely on magnets made from solid materials – for example, magnetic data storage devices or MRI body scan machines. But what if it were possible to make a magnetic device out of a liquid? This is the aim of this new research that uses 3D printing technologies.

This study was published on July, 19 in the journal Science. Tom Russel, a visiting faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab and professor of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts, led the study and explains, “We’ve made a new material that is both liquid and magnetic. No one has ever observed this before. This opens the door to a new area of science in magnetic soft matter.”

First, Tom Russel and Xubo Liu, the study’s lead authors came up with the idea of forming liquid structures from ferrofluids. Ferrofluids are solutions of iron-oxide particles that becomes highly magnetic in the presence of another magnet. Once this observation made, the scientists wondered if they could make the ferrofluids permanently magnetic, behaving like a solid magnet but looking like a liquid. Using a modified 3D printer, the researchers were able to 3D print droplets (1 millimeter in size) from a ferrofluid solution containing iron-oxide nanoparticles.