Dynamics of Magnetic Particles in a Magnetic Separation System Using the Finite Element Field Model and Level Set Method

Magnetic particles have been being adopted in various areas, ranging from engineering to biomedical fields such as magnetorheological fluids, separation of magnetically tagged DNA, drug delivery and identification of biological species. The particles in a fluid domain can be controlled by an external magnetic field. The magnetized particles also interact between themselves, revealing interesting characteristics. Many theoretical and computational studies have been presented to analyze these characteristics. However, since most of them are based on the point-dipole model, the mutual interaction between the particles has not been taken into account with a high degree of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new analysis method for particle interaction based on full magnetic field calculation. The particle system is modeled using the finite element method for magnetic field analysis. This is coupled with the level set method that can effectively capture moving geometry of ferromagnetic particles. Numerical results of two test problems of particle chaining and magnetic separation validate this approach for the system dynamics of magnetic particles.