Magnetic Nano-Composites and their Industrial Applications

Magnetic nano-composites are multi-component, nanosized magnetic materials, to generate the reaction to an outer stimulus (i.e., outer inert or alternative magnetic field). The novel nano-composites is a combination of excess of various materials such as liquid crystals, silica, gels, renewable polymers, carbon along with different magnetic particles. They have enormous applications in the medical diagnosis and therapy, catalysis and separation. These nano-carriers are generally classified into nano-tubes, nano-sheets, spherical nano-particles, nano-fibres, highly porous nano-composites. The porous nano-structures provides a better surface for the covalent or entrapment binding of enzymes, proteins, biomolecules and drugs but the major challenge is to design and make a desired structure with suitable surface properties and biocompatibility. Extensive efforts have been made to manipulate the mesoporous materials and its combination with other structure in order to synthesize a matrix with appropriate pore size, large surface area to volume ratio. "Bottom-up" and "Bottom-down" chemical-based synthesis methods have been broadly employed to prepare magnetic nano-particles. Magnetic nano-composites are produced from magnetic nano-particles and biopolymers by using sol-gel technique, chemical precipitation methods and Nanogen (TM), a microwave plasma method. In this chapter, we described the advances and developments in the formation/synthesis of magnetic nano-composites. This chapter will review the properties, characteristics and applications of the magnetic nano-composites.