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Fast water transport in graphene nanofluidic channels

Nature Nanotechnology volume 13, pages 238–245 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Superfast water transport discovered in graphitic nanoconduits, including carbon nanotubes and graphene nanochannels, implicates crucial applications in separation processes and energy conversion. Yet lack of complete understanding at the single-conduit level limits development of new carbon nanofluidic structures and devices with desired transport properties for practical applications. Here, we show that the hydraulic resistance and slippage of single graphene nanochannels can be accurately determined using capillary flow and a novel hybrid nanochannel design without estimating the capillary pressure. Our results reveal that the slip length of graphene in the graphene nanochannels is around 16 nm, albeit with a large variation from 0 to 200 nm regardless of the channel height. We corroborate this finding with molecular dynamics simulation results, which indicate that this wide distribution of the slip length is due to the surface charge of graphene as well as the interaction between graphene and its silica substrate.

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Fig. 1: Hybrid nanochannel design for water transport measurement in single graphene nanochannels.
Fig. 2: Capillary-filling measurement in hybrid graphene–silica nanochannels.
Fig. 3: Experimental mass flow resistance ratio in hybrid nanochannels with heights varying from 24 to 124 nm.
Fig. 4: The extracted slip length (L Slip,G) based on equation (3) for each individual hybrid nanochannel with β 0 greater than 1.
Fig. 5: MD simulations of water slippage in graphene nanochannels.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the Faculty Startup Fund (Boston University, USA) and the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) programme award (CBET-1653767). The authors would like to thank the Photonics Center at Boston University for the use of their fabrication and characterization facilities. S.J. and Z.X. acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China through grant no. 11472150. M.H. and J.K. are thankful for financial support by the AFOSR FATE MURI, grant no. FA9550-15-1-0514. H.G.P. appreciates the support from ETH grant (ETH-30 13-1) and Swiss National Science Foundation (200021-146856).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

    Quan Xie, Mohammad Amin Alibakhshi & Chuanhua Duan

  2. Department of Engineering Mechanics and Center for Nano and Micro Mechanics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Shuping Jiao & Zhiping Xu

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Marek Hempel & Jing Kong

  4. Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Hyung Gyu Park

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Contributions

C.D. conceived the idea and directed the project; C.D., Q.X. and M.A. designed the experiments; Q.X. fabricated the nanofluidic devices and performed the experiments; Q.X. and M.A. analysed the experimental data; S.J. and Z.X. performed the MD simulations; M.H., J.K. and H.G.P. provided graphene samples; C.D., Q.X. and Z.X. wrote the manuscript. All authors participated in completing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Chuanhua Duan.

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Xie, Q., Alibakhshi, M.A., Jiao, S. et al. Fast water transport in graphene nanofluidic channels. Nature Nanotech 13, 238–245 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-017-0031-9

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