Self-assembly of silica microparticles in magnetic multiphase flows: Experiment and simulation

Dynamic self-assembly, especially self-assembly under magnetic field, is vital not only for its marvelous phenomenon but also for its mechanisms. Revealing the underlying mechanisms is crucial for a deeper understanding of self-assembly. In this paper, several magnetic induced self-assembly experiments by using the mixed magnetic multiphase fluids comprised of silica microspheres were carried out. The relations of the strength of external magnetic field, the inverse magnetorheological effect, and the structures of self-assembled particles were investigated. In addition, a momentum-exchanged immersed boundary-based lattice Boltzmann method (MEIB-LBM) for modeling multi-physical coupling multiphase flows was employed to numerically study the magnetic induced self-assembly process in detail. The present work showed that the external magnetic field can be used to control the form of self-assembly of nonmagnetic microparticles in a chain-like structure, and the self-assembly process can be classified into four...