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Fluidity of water confined to subnanometre films

Nature volume 413, pages 51–54 (2001)Cite this article

Abstract

The fluidity of water in confined geometries is relevant to processes ranging from tribology to protein folding, and its molecular mobility in pores and slits has been extensively studied using a variety of approaches1,2,3,4,5,6. Studies in which liquid flow is measured directly suggest that the viscosity of aqueous electrolytes confined to films of thickness greater than about 2–3 nm remains close to that in the bulk7,8,9; this behaviour is similar to that of non-associative organic liquids confined to films thicker than about 7–8 molecular layers8,10,11. Here we observe that the effective viscosity of water remains within a factor of three of its bulk value, even when it is confined to films in the thickness range 3.5 ± 1 to 0.0 ± 0.4 nm. This contrasts markedly with the behaviour of organic solvents, whose viscosity diverges when confined to films thinner than about 5–8 molecular layers10,11,12,13,14,15. We attribute this to the fundamentally different mechanisms of solidification in the two cases. For non-associative liquids, confinement promotes solidification by suppressing translational freedom of the molecules11,15,16,17,18; however, in the case of water, confinement seems primarily to suppress the formation of the highly directional hydrogen-bonded networks associated with freezing1,3.

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Figure 1: Normal surface interaction measurements used to control for the water and surface characteristics in our experiments.
Figure 2: Measurements of the shear forces between sliding mica surfaces across water during approach to contact.
Figure 3: Evaluation of the effective viscosity of confined water from the jump-in data (Fig. 2).

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Chandler, J. Israelachvili, S. Safran and S. Titmuss for comments and discussions. We thank the Eshkol Foundation for a studentship (U.R.), and the US–Israel Binational science Foundation, the Deutsche–Israelische Program (DIP) and the Minerva Foundation for their support of this work.

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Author notes

  1. Pierre Laurat

    Present address: Service Recherche Technologies et Systèmes, LEGRAND SA 128, avenue de Lattre de Tassigny, 87045, Limoges Cedex, France

  2. Jacob Klein

    Present address: Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QZ, UK

  3. Jacob Klein: Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to J.K.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

    Uri Raviv

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  1. Uri Raviv
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Correspondence to Jacob Klein.

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Raviv, U., Laurat, P. & Klein, J. Fluidity of water confined to subnanometre films. Nature 413, 51–54 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35092523

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