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Nanofluidic transport governed by the liquid/vapour interface

Nature Nanotechnology volume 9, pages 317–323 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

Liquid/vapour interfaces govern the behaviour of a wide range of systems but remain poorly understood, leaving ample margin for the exploitation of intriguing functionalities for applications. Here, we systematically investigate the role of liquid/vapour interfaces in the transport of water across apposing liquid menisci in osmosis membranes comprising short hydrophobic nanopores that separate two fluid reservoirs. We show experimentally that mass transport is limited by molecular reflection from the liquid/vapour interface below a certain length scale, which depends on the transmission probability of water molecules across the nanopores and on the condensation probability of a water molecule incident on the liquid surface. This fundamental yet elusive condensation property of water is measured under near-equilibrium conditions and found to decrease from 0.36 ± 0.21 at 30 °C to 0.18 ± 0.09 at 60 °C. These findings define the regime in which liquid/vapour interfaces govern nanofluidic transport and have implications for understanding mass transport in nanofluidic devices, droplets and bubbles, biological components and porous media involving liquid/vapour interfaces.

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Figure 1: Fabrication of osmosis membranes with nanoscale vapour traps.
Figure 2: Verification of membrane integrity.
Figure 3: Demonstration of vapour-phase transport.
Figure 4: Scaling behaviour of measured water flux.
Figure 5: Regime of interface-governed transport and estimated condensation coefficients.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank T. Humplik for assistance with X-ray diffraction analysis, N. Milkovic for environmental SEM, J. S. Jeon for confocal microscopy and F. Rahman for helpful discussions. This work was funded by King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, through the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy at MIT and KFUPM (project no. R10-CW-09). This work made use of the MRSEC Shared Experimental Facilities supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF, award no. DMR-0819762), the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a member of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) that is supported by the NSF (award no. ECS-0335765) and the Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Jongho Lee & Rohit Karnik

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

    Tahar Laoui

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J.L. and R.K. conceived and designed the experiments. J.L. performed the research. J.L., T.L. and R.K. analysed the data and discussed the results. J.L. and R.K. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Rohit Karnik.

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Lee, J., Laoui, T. & Karnik, R. Nanofluidic transport governed by the liquid/vapour interface. Nature Nanotech 9, 317–323 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.28

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