Magnetic emulsions could clean up oil spills

A standard magnet can be used to pull magnetic emulsions along a capillary

Researchers have unveiled a molecule that can make "magnetic emulsions", which has the potential to revolutionise the chemical industry.

Emulsions are blends which normally do not mix, like oil and water.

The team's custom-made molecule, described in Soft Matter, acts as an "emulsifier", coating oily materials and acting to blend the liquids.

But because the molecule responds to magnetic fields, it could be put to use in cleaning up oil spills.

The work is an extension of the "magnetic soap" the team reported in January and published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The earlier work showed promise for industrial and cleanup applications, but study co-author Julian Eastoe of the University of Bristol said the new paper demonstrates "a practical application without a shadow of a doubt".

The idea of an "emulsion" in paint may be the only familiar use of the word, but emulsions are tremendously common in industrial chemicals and also in many products found under the kitchen sink.

It makes them part of an industry worth billions of pounds.

What is clear from the team's demonstrations is that their magnetic emulsions will be useful in the cleanup of oil spills.

"We're making emulsions from essentially seawater and the kind of oils that would be spilled, and we're seeing that we can manipulate them using a magnetic field," Mr Eastoe told BBC News.
 

Heads and tails

At the heart of both ideas are what are known as surfactants - short for surface-active agents - that are based on metal atoms, which respond to magnetic fields.


These magnetic surfactants are long chains of atoms, with metal atoms at one end.

One end of these surfactant molecules is "hydrophilic", or water-loving, and the other "hydrophobic", or water-fearing.

Magnetic soap, shown here in a droplet attracted to a magnet, was the starting point of the research

In a mixture including water and oily substances, the molecules surround bubbles of oils, aligning themselves with their hydrophilic tails pointing outward into the water.

To achieve this effect, Prof Eastoe said the team changed their original formula.

"We've changed the identity of the magnetic component and made it much more active, by replacing what was iron by another iron complex or another complex of gadolinium," he said.

The result is that the magnetic molecules create emulsions even when added in small amounts to currently available surfactants - so they could be easily implemented into industrial or clean-up applications.

Prof Eastoe also says that the simple preparation of the molecules could mean they join a number of other approaches to deliver medicines to specific sites in the body using magnetic fields.

Article from BBC News.

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Why Earth's Magnetic Field Is Wonky

The solution to a long-standing puzzle, why magnetic north sits off the coast of Canada, rather than at the North Pole, may have been found in the strange, lopsided nature of Earth's inner core.

The inner core is a ball of solid iron about 760 miles (1,220 kilometers) wide. It is surrounded by a liquid outer core (mostly iron and nickel), a rocky, viscous mantle layer and a thin, solid crust.

The Earth's magnetic field, magnetic poles and geographic poles.
CREDIT: Earth's Magnetic Field image via Shutterstock

As the inner core cools, crystallizing iron releases impurities, sending lighter molten material into the liquid outer core. This upwelling, combined with the Earth's rotation, drives convection, forcing the molten metal into whirling vortices. These vortices stretch and twist magnetic field lines, creating Earth’s magnetic field. Currently, the center of the field, called an axis, emerges in the Arctic Ocean west of Ellesmere Island, about 300 miles (500 kilometers) from the geographic North Pole.

In the last decade, seismic waves from earthquakes revealed the inner core looks like a navel orange, bulging slightly more on its western half. Geoscientists recently explainedthe asymmetry by proposing a convective loop: The inner core might be crystallizing on one half and melting on the other.

Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen, geophysicists at Johns Hopkins University, set out to test this theory, called translational instability. They ran numerical models simulating the forces that generate Earth’s magnetic field, and included a lopsided inner core.

Olson and Deguen found that adding inner-core asymmetry shifted magnetic north away from the center of the Earth, into the cooling hemisphere. Convection was stronger there, as was the magnetic field.

"The lopsided growth of the inner core makes convection in the outer core a little bit lopsided, and that then induces the geomagnetic field to have this lopsided or eccentric character too," Olson told OurAmazingPlanet. Olson and Deguen's research was detailed online July 1 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Geophysicist Bruce Buffett said Olson and Deguen’s research is intriguing, but there are still questions about the underlying theory. "It's an interesting result, but we don't know for sure the inner core is translating. The model does a good job at explaining some but not all of the features of the inner core," said Buffett, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the research.

Olson points out that his numerical model offers a real-world proof of the theory. Magnetic particles trapped and aligned in rocks reveal that the magnetic north pole wandered around the Western Hemisphere over the past 10,000 years, and circled the Eastern Hemisphere before that — a result mirrored by the numerical test. Gathering a longer, more detailed record of the magnetic field's behavior, Olson said, could reveal whether the inner core acts as researchers predict.

"The key question for interesting ideas like translational instability is, 'Can we test it?'" Olson said. "What we're doing is proposing a test, and we think it's a good test because people can go out and look for eccentricity in the rock record and that will either confirm or shoot down this idea."

This article was provided by OurAmazingPlanet, a sister site to LiveScience.
Article written by Becky Oskin, OurAmazingPlanet Contributor

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