FERROFLUID FULL

The material has come to be used in a variety of applications, from loudspeakers to petroleum refining and chemical processing facilities, to semiconductor chip manufacturing (Spinoff 1980, 1981, 1993, 2015). Two Avco engineers licensed the technology from NASA to found Ferrofluidics Corporation, now Ferrotec. The basic trick to creating a ferrofluid is to make the magnetic nanoparticles so tiny they naturally spread throughout the carrier fluid, rather than settling out of it, and to coat them with a surfactant that prevents them from clumping together. A few years later, a company called Avco Space Systems won a NASA contract to further characterize and develop ferrofluid and managed to create a variety of liquids that ranged up to 10 times the magnetic strength of the initial Lewis invention. He discovered a way to stably disperse magnetic nanoparticles throughout a carrier fluid, making the first ferrofluid. In the early 1960s, Steve Papell, an engineer at Lewis Research Center, now Glenn Research Center, came up with the idea of magnetizing rocket fuel as a way to draw it from a storage tank into an engine in the absence of gravity. Perhaps it’s not surprising that ferrofluid is not an ideal art material: after all, it wasn’t invented for aesthetic purposes, but rather for space travel. But if the ferrofluid mixes with the suspension liquid, the dark fluid quickly stains the glass and makes a mess. It’s then manipulated by a magnet outside the chamber.

FERROFLUID FULL

In a typical display, a small amount of dark ferrofluid is placed in a clear glass chamber full of a clear suspension liquid. So he decided to make his own-and soon learned why more people weren’t doing it: “It stains everything,” he says. “It looked like the T-1000 from Terminator 2 come to life,” he recalls.īut he couldn’t find a display of the magnetized liquid available for sale anywhere online. In 2008, when Nikola Ilic came across an online video of moving ferrofluid sculptures by Japanese artist Sachiko Kodama, with black liquid rising into swirling bristles that joined into quivering spikes, the artist-entrepreneur immediately wanted a ferrofluid display for his desk.