Energy dissipation of rigid dipoles in a viscous fluid under the action of a time-periodic field: the influence of thermal bath and dipole interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal noise and dipole interactions influence energy dissipation in rigid dipoles within ferrofluids under an alternating magnetic field, combining analytical and numerical methods to optimize heating efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive model that incorporates thermal noise and dipole interactions, providing analytical and numerical insights into energy dissipation mechanisms.

Findings

Thermal noise can enhance energy dissipation by destroying particle clusters.

Dipole interactions can reduce power loss, but thermal noise can mitigate this effect.

Optimal conditions for maximum heating efficiency are identified.

Abstract

Ferrofluid heating by an external alternating field is studied based on the rigid dipole model, where the magnetization of each particle in a fluid is supposed to be firmly fixed in the crystal lattice. Equations of motion, employing the Newton's second law for rotational motion, the condition of rigid body rotation, and the assumption that the friction torque is proportional to angular velocity, are used. This oversimplification permits us to expand the model easily: to take into account the thermal noise and inter-particle interaction that allows to estimate from unified positions the role of thermal activation and dipole interaction in the heating process. Our studies are conducted in three stages. The exact expressions for the average power loss of a single particle are obtained within the dynamical approximation. Then, in the stochastic case, the power loss of a single particle is estimated analytically using the Fokker-Planck equation and numerically using the effective Langevin equation. Finally, the power loss for the particle ensemble is obtained using the molecular dynamics method. Here, the local dipole fields are calculated approximately based on the Barnes-Hut algorithm. The revealed trends in the behaviour of both a single particle and the particle ensemble suggest the way of choosing the conditions for obtaining the maximum heating efficiency. The competitiveness character of the inter-particle interaction and thermal noise is investigated in details. Two situations, when the thermal noise rectifies the power loss reduction caused by the interaction, are described. The first of them is related to the complete destruction of dense clusters at high noise intensity. The second one is originated from the rare switching of the particles in clusters due to thermal activation, when the noise intensity is relatively weak.