Nanotechnology: ferrofluids to liquid crystals

Nanotechnology: ferrofluids and liquid crystals

Objective

• To synthesize an aqueous ferrofluid (magnetite) and observe its properties.
• To understand how nanotechnology affects everyday life.
• To learn about surfactants and how they work.

Grading

• Pre-Lab (10%)
• Lab Report Form (80%)
• TA Points (10%)

Background information

Nanotechnology is the science of controlling matter with dimensions between 1 and 100 nanometers. This includes manipulating individual molecules. It is a multidisciplinary field consisting of physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, engineering, and nearly any other applied science. The prefix nano- means ten to the minus ninth power, or one billionth. There have been great advances in nanotechnology in recent years, and scientists routinely make materials that are only a few nanometers in size, or about 1/80,000 the diameter of a human hair. See Figure 1 to notice how small a nanometer is compared to other common materials.

Materials at the nanoscale exhibit interesting optical, electronic, physical, and chemical properties due to their small size. For example, catalysis chemical reactions occur at the surface of bulk material so as particles become smaller, the ratio of the surface area to the volume of the particles increases, thereby making a volume of nanoparticle catalysts more reactive than an equal volume of bulk catalyst. Optical properties of bulk materials are not size dependant, that is no matter what the size of a piece of bulk material it will have the same optical properties. This is not the case for nanomaterials. As you will see in the instructor demo, different sizes of gold nanoparticles exhibit very different colors.

In the 1960s NASA Research Centers discovered fluids that could be controlled through the application of a magnetic field. These fluids were developed to confine liquids in space. These nanoparticle fluids are commonly known as ferrofluids and they are still an active area of research.

Ferrofluids have many current industrial applications. They are used to dampen vibration in audio loudspeakers, they can behave as liquid O-rings in rotating shaft seals, and they are used in high-speed computer disk drives to eliminate impurities. They also have many potential applications in biomedical, environmental, and engineering fields.

Figure 1-Obtained from Office of Basic Energy Sciences, US Department of Energy

A ferrofluid is a stable colloid suspension of magnetic nanoparticles in a liquid carrier. The nanoparticles are suspended throughout the liquid and have an average size of ~10 nm. It is critical that the nanoparticles are coated with surfactant to prevent the particles from aggregating together. The surfactants must be strong enough to prevent agglomeration even when a magnetic field is applied and they must overcome the intermolecular forces between the nanoparticles. For this reason, a typical ferrofluid contains 5% magnetic nanoparticles, 10% surfactant, and 85% carrier fluid by volume.

There are two basic steps in creating a ferrofluid: synthesis of the magnetic solid, magnetite ( ${\text{Fe}}_3{O}_4$ ), and suspension in water with the aid of a surfactant. The magnetic particles must be very small on the order of 10 nm (100Å) in diameter, so that the thermal energy of the particles is large enough to overcome the magnetic interactions between particles. If the particles are too large, magnetic interactions will dominate and the particles will agglomerate. The magnetite will be synthesized by a precipitation reaction that occurs upon mixing ${\text{FeCl}}_2$ and ${\text{FeCl}}_3$ with ammonium hydroxide (an aqueous solution of ammonia, ${\text{NH}}_3$ ). The unbalanced equation for this reaction is as follows: