Alessandro Siria (Chargé de recherche CNRS, ENS)
Nanofluidics is the frontier at which the continuum picture of fluid mechanics meets the atomic nature of matter. New models of fluid transport are expected to emerge from the confinement of liquids at the nanoscale, with potential applications in ultrafiltration, desalination and energy conversion [1-3].
Nevertheless, advancing our fundamental understanding of fluid transport on the smallest scales requires mass and ion dynamics to be ultimately characterized across an individual channel to avoid averaging over many pores. A major challenge for nanofluidics thus lies in building distinct and well-controlled nanochannels, amenable to the systematic exploration of their properties.
In this context a system of particular interest is represented by individual nanotubes : measurements and simulations have shown that water moves through carbon nanotubes at exceptionally high rates owing to nearly frictionless interfaces [4, 5]. These observations have stimulated interest in nanotube-based membranes, yet the exact mechanism of water transport inside the nanotubes and at the water-carbon interface continues to be debated, because existing theories do not provide a satisfactory explanation for the limited number of experimental results available so far. This lack of experimental results arises because, even though controlled and systematic studies have explored transport through individual nanotubes, none has met the considerable technical challenge of unambiguously measuring the permeability of a single nanotube.
In this lecture we revisit the current state of the art of nanofluidics and discuss how nano-assembling and manipulation offer new tools to investigate the fluid transport at a scale where the limit of the classic description is met [2]. We finally present our recent studies on fluid transport in individual nanotubes and put them in the perspective of the new field of carbon nanofluidics [6].
Éléments de bibliographie :
[1] L. Bocquet, E. Charlaix : « Nanofluidics, from bulk to interfaces », Chemical Society Reviews 39, 2010, 1073–1095
[2] D. Cohen-Tanugi, J. Grossman : « Water desalination across nanoporous graphene », Nano Letters 12, 2012, 3602–3608
[3] A. Siria, P. Poncharal, A. L. Biance, R. Fulcrand, X. Blase, S. T. Purcell, L. Bocquet : « Giant osmotic energy conversion measured in a single transmembrane boron nitride nanotube », Nature 494, 2013, 455–458
[4] J. K. Holt, H. G. Park, Y. Wang, M. Stadermann, A. B. Artyukhin, C. P. Grigoropoulos, A. Noy, O. Bakajin : « Fast mass transport through sub-2-nanometer carbon nanotubes », Science 312, 2006, 1034–1037
[5] K. Falk, F. Sedlmeier, L. Joly, R. R. Netz, L. Bocquet : « Molecular origin of fast water transport in carbon nanotube membranes : superlubricity versus curvature dependent friction », Nano Letters 10, 2010, 4067–4073
[6] E. Secchi, S. Marbach, A. Niguès, D. Stein, A. Siria, L. Bocquet : « Massive radius-dependent flow slippage in carbon nanotubes », Nature 537, 2016, 210–213
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