Magnetic nanoparticles could aid heat dissipation

Particles suspended in cooling water could prevent hotspots in nuclear plant cooling systems and electronics.

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

The MIT team's experimental setup is pictured above.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS

Cooling systems generally rely on water pumped through pipes to remove unwanted heat. Now, researchers at MIT and in Australia have found a way of enhancing heat transfer in such systems by using magnetic fields, a method that could prevent hotspots that can lead to system failures. The system could also be applied to cooling everything from electronic devices to advanced fusion reactors, they say.

The system, which relies on a slurry of tiny particles of magnetite, a form of iron oxide, is described in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, in a paper co-authored by MIT researchers Jacopo Buongiorno and Lin-Wen Hu, and four others.

Hu, associate director of MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, says the new results are the culmination of several years of research on nanofluids — nanoparticles dissolved in water. The new work involved experiments where the magnetite nanofluid flowed through tubes and was manipulated by magnets placed on the outside of the tubes.

The magnets, Hu says, “attract the particles closer to the heated surface” of the tube, greatly enhancing the transfer of heat from the fluid, through the walls of the tube, and into the outside air. Without the magnets in place, the fluid behaves just like water, with no change in its cooling properties. But with the magnets, the heat transfer coefficient is higher, she says — in the best case, about 300 percent better than with plain water. “We were very surprised” by the magnitude of the improvement, Hu says.

Conventional methods to increase heat transfer in cooling systems employ features such as fins and grooves on the surfaces of the pipes, increasing their surface area. That provides some improvement in heat transfer, Hu says, but not nearly as much as the magnetic particles. Also, fabrication of these features can be expensive.

The explanation for the improvement in the new system, Hu says, is that the magnetic field tends to cause the particles to clump together — possibly forming a chainlike structure on the side of the tube closest to the magnet, disrupting the flow there, and increasing the local temperature gradient.

While the idea has been suggested before, it had never been proved in action, Hu says. “This is the first work we know of that demonstrates this experimentally,” she says.

Such a system would be impractical for application to an entire cooling system, she says, but could be useful in any system where hotspots appear on the surface of cooling pipes. One way to deal with that would be to put in a magnetic fluid, and magnets outside the pipe next to the hotspot, to enhance heat transfer at that spot.

“It’s a neat way to enhance heat transfer,” says Buongiorno, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. “You can imagine magnets put at strategic locations,” and if those are electromagnets that can be switched on and off, “when you want to turn the cooling up, you turn up the magnets, and get a very localized cooling there.” 

While heat transfer can be enhanced in other ways, such as by simply pumping the cooling fluid through the system faster, such methods use more energy and increase the pressure drop in the system, which may not be desirable in some situations. 

There could be numerous applications for such a system, Buongiorno says: “You can think of other systems that require not necessarily systemwide cooling, but localized cooling.” For example, microchips and other electronic systems may have areas that are subject to strong heating. New devices such as “lab on a chip” microsystems could also benefit from such selective cooling, he says.

Going forward, Buongiorno says, this approach might even be useful for fusion reactors, where there can be “localized hotspots where the heat flux is much higher than the average.”

But these applications remain well in the future, the researchers say. “This is a basic study at the point,” Buongiorno says. “It just shows this effect happens.”

The team also included Thomas McKrell, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Elham Doroodchi, Behdad Moghtaderi, and Reza Azizian of the University of Newcastle in Australia. The work was supported by the University of Newcastle, Granite Power Ltd., the Australian Research Council, and King Saud University in Saudi Arabia.

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Car Mechanic Dreams Up a Tool to Ease Births

The idea came to Jorge Odón as he slept. Somehow, he said, his unconscious made the leap from a YouTube video he had just seen on extracting a lost cork from a wine bottle to the realization that the same parlor trick could save a baby stuck in the birth canal.

Mr. Odón, 59, an Argentine car mechanic, built his first prototype in his kitchen, using a glass jar for a womb, his daughter’s doll for the trapped baby, and a fabric bag and sleeve sewn by his wife as his lifesaving device.

Unlikely as it seems, the idea that took shape on his counter has won the enthusiastic endorsement of the World Health Organization and major donors, and an American medical technology company has just licensed it for production.

With the Odón Device, an attendant slips a plastic bag inside a lubricated plastic sleeve around the head, inflates it to grip the head and pulls the bag until the baby emerges.

Doctors say it has enormous potential to save babies in poor countries, and perhaps to reduce cesarean section births in rich ones.

“This is very exciting,” said Dr. Mario Merialdi, the W.H.O.’s chief coordinator for improving maternal and perinatal health and an early champion of the Odón Device. “This critical moment of life is one in which there’s been very little advancement for years.”

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A Neuroscientist’s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious

It’s a question that’s perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: Where does consciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from chemistry and electricity in our brains is an unsolved mystery.

Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, thinks he might know the answer. According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That’s just the way the universe works.

“The electric charge of an electron doesn’t arise out of more elemental properties. It simply has a charge,” says Koch. “Likewise, I argue that we live in a universe of space, time, mass, energy, and consciousness arising out of complex systems.”

What Koch proposes is a scientifically refined version of an ancient philosophical doctrine called panpsychism — and, coming from someone else, it might sound more like spirituality than science. But Koch has devoted the last three decades to studying the neurological basis of consciousness. His work at the Allen Institute now puts him at the forefront of the BRAIN Initiative, the massive new effort to understand how brains work, which will begin next year.

Koch’s insights have been detailed in dozens of scientific articles and a series of books, including last year’s Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. WIRED talked to Koch about his understanding of this age-old question.

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