"Most surfaces are passive," says Kripa Varanasi, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "They rely on gravity, or other forces, to move fluids or particles."
Varanasi's team decided to use external fields, such as magnetic fields, to make surfaces active, exerting precise control over the behaviour of particles or droplets moving over them.
The system makes use of a micro-textured surface, with bumps or ridges, just a few micrometres across, that is then impregnated with a fluid that can be manipulated; for example, an oil infused with tiny magnetic particles, or ferrofluid, which can be pushed and pulled by applying a magnetic field to the surface. When droplets of water or tiny particles are placed on the surface, a thin coating of the fluid covers them, forming a magnetic cloak.
The thin magnetised cloak can then actually pull the droplet or particle along as the layer itself is drawn magnetically across the surface. Tiny ferromagnetic particles in the ferrofluid, approximately 10 nanometres in diameter, could allow precision control when it's needed, such as in a microfluidic device used to test biological or chemical samples by mixing them with a variety of reagents. Unlike the fixed channels of conventional microfluidics, such surfaces could have 'virtual' channels that could be reconfigured at will.
While other researchers have developed systems that use magnetism to move particles or fluids, these require the material being moved to be magnetic, and very strong magnetic fields to move them around. The new system, which produces a super-slippery surface that lets fluids and particles slide around with virtually no friction, needs much less force to move these materials, allowing high velocities to be attained with small applied forces.
The new approach could be useful for a range of applications. For example, solar panels and the mirrors used in solar-concentrating systems can quickly lose a significant percentage of their efficiency when dust, moisture, or other materials accumulate on their surfaces. But if coated with such an active surface material, a brief magnetic pulse could be used to sweep the material away.
"Fouling is a big problem on such mirrors," Varanasi says. "The data shows a loss of almost one percent of efficiency per week."
Electric fields cannot penetrate into conductive fluids, such as biological fluids, so conventional systems are not able to manipulate them. But with this system, electrical conductivity is not important.
In addition, this approach gives a great deal of control over how material moves. Active fields, such as electric, magnetic, and acoustic fields, have been used to manipulate materials, but rarely does the surface itself interact actively with the material on it, which allows much greater precision.
While this initial demonstration used a magnetic fluid, the team says the same principle could be applied using other forces to manipulate the material, such as electric fields or differences in temperature.