Tag Archives: sandcastles

Building nanocastles in the sand

Scientists have taken inspiration from sandcastles to build robots made of nanoparticles. From an Aug. 5, 2015 news item on ScienceDaily,

If you want to form very flexible chains of nanoparticles in liquid in order to build tiny robots with flexible joints or make magnetically self-healing gels, you need to revert to childhood and think about sandcastles.

In a paper published this week in Nature Materials, researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill show that magnetic nanoparticles encased in oily liquid shells can bind together in water, much like sand particles mixed with the right amount of water can form sandcastles.

An Aug. 5, 2015 North Carolina State University (NCSU) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Mick Kulikowski, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

“Because oil and water don’t mix, the oil wets the particles and creates capillary bridges between them so that the particles stick together on contact,” said Orlin Velev, INVISTA Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State and the corresponding author of the paper.

“We then add a magnetic field to arrange the nanoparticle chains and provide directionality,” said Bhuvnesh Bharti, research assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and first author of the paper.

Chilling the oil is like drying the sandcastle. Reducing the temperature from 45 degrees Celsius to 15 degrees Celsius freezes the oil and makes the bridges fragile, leading to breaking and fragmentation of the nanoparticle chains. Yet the broken nanoparticles chains will re-form if the temperature is raised, the oil liquefies and an external magnetic field is applied to the particles.

“In other words, this material is temperature responsive, and these soft and flexible structures can be pulled apart and rearranged,” Velev said. “And there are no other chemicals necessary.”

The paper is also co-authored by Anne-Laure Fameau, a visiting researcher from INRA [French National Institute for Agricultural Research or Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique], France. …

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Nanocapillarity-mediated magnetic assembly of nanoparticles into ultraflexible filaments and reconfigurable networks by Bhuvnesh Bharti, Anne-Laure Fameau, Michael Rubinstein, & Orlin D. Velev. Nature Materials (2015) doi:10.1038/nmat4364 Published online 03 August 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.