Computer Simulation of Magnetic Chromatography System for Ultra-Fine Particle Separation

Abstract

We propose magnetic chromatography (MC) as a new technique for ultra-fine particle separation. We developed an MC simulator, and modeled the transient behavior of 300Å and 500Å particles by taking into account the fluid flow field, magnetic field distribution, and particle diffusion. For the range of flow velocity between 1.0×10^-4 and 1.0×10^-3m/s, the separation efficiency increased with decreasing the flow velocity and increasing the ratio of particle magnetic susceptibility. To improve the separation efficiency, it is also very important to extend the channel length; longer channels (4.0m) completely separated two kinds of ultra-fine particles that can not be separated by shorter channels (i.e., 0.4m). For the smaller particles (300Å), increasing the applied magnetic field strength improves the separation efficiency. We also simulated other types of MC systems, and found that regardless of flow velocity an MC system with a staggered-wire arrangement always has better separation efficiency than an MC system with a face-to-face wire arrangement.