Analysing thermophoretic transport of water for designing nanoscale-pumps

Abstract

The net flow of water through a thermal nanopump is linearly dependent on the imposed thermal gradient of the carbon nanotube, leading to controlled water transport.

Metallicity‐Dependent Ultrafast Water Transport in Carbon Nanotubes

“…Therefore, the obtained pressure difference across the membrane is calculated using the Equation S7 in SI. That type of non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations used to create a pressure gradient can also be applicable for thermal [48][49] and stiffness [50] gradients. Software details and modeling parameters are provided in Section S13 in SI.…”

Fast and versatile thermo-osmotic flows with a pinch of salt

“…Historically, the first experimental results on thermo-osmosis were published by Lippmann 9 and Aubert 10 at the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, a broad literature has been devoted to the study of aqueous solutions and various membranes, both from experiments [11][12][13][14][15] or molecular dynamics (MD) simulations [16][17][18][19][20] . Some disagreements have been reported for aqueous electrolytes, specifically in the flow direction (toward the hot side, so-called thermophilic flow, or toward the cold side, so-called thermophobic flow) for similar systems [21][22][23][24] , or on the relation between the flow amplitude and surface charge 13 .…”

“…Thermo-osmosis has seen a renewed interest due to the massive thermo-osmotic responses predicted by the use of novel materials, such as soft nanochannels 30 , carbon-nanotubes 5,18,31 or graphene 17 , together with novel experiments by Bregulla et al 24 , which first reported a microscale manifestation of thermo-osmotic flows. Thermo-osmotic flows could in particular be boosted by the slip boundary condition (BC), which describes the velocity jump v s at the interface by a general expression first proposed by Navier 32,33 :…”

Nano-pump based on exothermic surface reactions

“…Other models of pumps based on temperature gradient show comparable velocities at a micro sized pump. 6 High pumping rates (B1 m s À1 ) theoretically can be obtained with high temperature gradients (B20-100 K nm À1 ) at nano-sized pumps, 7,16 but such extreme gradients may be difficult to achieve in experiments.…”