Title
Barriers to superfast water transport in carbon nanotube membranes
Date Issued
08 May 2013
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Computational Science and Engineering Laboratory
Abstract
Carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes hold the promise of extraordinary fast water transport for applications such as energy efficient filtration and molecular level drug delivery. However, experiments and computations have reported flow rate enhancements over continuum hydrodynamics that contradict each other by orders of magnitude. We perform large scale molecular dynamics simulations emulating for the first time the micrometer thick CNTs membranes used in experiments. We find transport enhancement rates that are length dependent due to entrance and exit losses but asymptote to 2 orders of magnitude over the continuum predictions. These rates are far below those reported experimentally. The results suggest that the reported superfast water transport rates cannot be attributed to interactions of water with pristine CNTs alone. © 2013 American Chemical Society.
Start page
1910
End page
1914
Volume
13
Issue
5
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ingeniería, Tecnología
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-84877291239
PubMed ID
Source
Nano Letters
ISSN of the container
15306984
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus