The manipulation of a nanoconfined fluid flow is a great challenge and is critical in both fundamental research and practical applications. Compared with chemical or biochemical stimulation, the use of temperature as controllable, physical stimulation possesses huge advantages, such as low cost, easy operation, reversibility, and no contamination. We demonstrate an elegant, simple strategy by which temperature stimulation can readily manipulate the nanoconfined water flow by tuning interfacial and viscous resistances. We show that with an increase in temperature, the water fluidity is decreased in hydrophilic nanopores, whereas it is enhanced by at least four orders of magnitude in hydrophobic nanopores, especially in carbon nanotubes with a controlled size and atomically smooth walls. We attribute these opposing trends to a dramatic difference in varying surface wettability that results from a small temperature variation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.