Senior Project Weeks 6, 7, 8 (5/6-5/23)

Apologies for the lack of blog posts! Throughout these past few weeks, I continuously performed experiments with the droplets where I varied either volume fraction or ferrofluid concentration and allowed the droplets to align at 50C for an hour, in order to determine the optimal conditions for creating chains of a certain length. Because of this, I haven’t had many results to share as my time has mainly been focused on data collection.

With the help of a computer algorithm created by another member of the team, we began creating several graphs based on the videos of the chain alignment that showed values such as average chain length and average coordination number of droplets in a sample. 

After identifying the optimal conditions for chain growth, I began exploring what could be done with these chains. An experiment I have begun performing involves aligning long chains in one direction, then cooling them and allowing them to fold, and then realigning them in the other direction in order to force the chains to begin turning and creating a spiderweb-like formation. This is something that I am still working on optimizing, but in the meantime, it creates some very interesting-looking videos!