Systematic analysis of ferrofluid: a visualization review, advances engineering applications, and challenges

With the broader use of ferrofluid in industry and the sciences, ferrofluid research has produced many new branches. To obtain systematic analytical results and to help researchers gain insight into the dynamics of ferrofluid research, in this review, we first track and summarize the ferrofluid research over the past 15 years to assay how ferrofluid can contribute to modern technology. We have got several important research directions (basic physics research, medical applications, and engineering applications) using keywords as an entry point by visualizing the cluster analysis. Visualization to highlight important schools and organizations. By analyzing the number of papers and citations at a given institution, we obtained a list of influential institutions and schools and indicated the current research directions of these institutions. This list greatly helps researchers to understand the authoritative papers as well as the latest results. In particular, we draw connections between publication year and novel engineering applications and show how they impact future development-the increasing use of ferrofluids in microfluidic environments and the increasing study of their soft and reshapable properties. Next, we focus on ferrofluid applications in six engineering fields and summarize the development history and research status. Finally, by analyzing the current status of each application, we summarize two challenges, that is to strengthen the research on the micromechanism of ferrofluid and to prepare a ferrofluid with better performance. The originality of this study is that it uses visualization to describe the current state of research and development patterns instead of thousands of papers, providing valuable reference information for existing researchers and practitioners.

Automated summary

This review tracks and summarizes the research on ferrofluid over the past 15 years to assess its contribution to modern technology. The review identifies important research directions, such as basic physics research, medical applications, and engineering applications, through cluster analysis using keywords. It highlights important schools and organizations and provides a list of influential institutions and schools based on the number of papers and citations. The review also summarizes the development history and research status of ferrofluid applications in six engineering fields and highlights two challenges: strengthening research on the micromechanism of ferrofluid and developing ferrofluid with better performance. The use of visualization in describing the current state of research and development patterns provides valuable reference information for researchers and practitioners.