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Fluid transport at the nanoscales and blue energy harvesting
« There is plenty of room at the bottom ». This visionary foresight of R. Feynman, introduced during a lecture at Caltech in 1959, was at the root of numerous scientific and technological developments, taking benefit of the "strange phenomena" occuring at the smallest scales. There remains however a lot to explore, in particular in the context of fluids at the nanoscales and their specific transport properties.
In this talk, I will discuss some theoretical and experimental results obtained in our group on the fluid transport at small scales, in particular inside nanopores, nanochannels and nanotubes. More specifically, I will focus on the study of transport inside a single Boron-Nitribe nanotube, obtained in a specifically developped trans-membrane nanofluidic device. Experiments show unprecedented energy conversion from salt concentration gradients. Applications in the field of osmotic energy harvesting will be discussed.
References :
« Large apparent electric size of solid-state nanopores due to spatially extended surface conduction »,
C.Y. Lee, L. Joly, A. Siria, A.-L. Biance, R. Fulcrand, L. Bocquet, NanoLetters 12 4037-4044 (2012)
« Soft nanofluidic transport in a soap film », O. Bonhomme, O. Liot, A.-L. Biance, and L. Bocquet,
to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. (2013)
« Giant osmotic energy conversion measured in a single transmembrane boron-nitride nanotube »,
A. Siria, P. Poncharal, A.-L. Biance, R. Fulcrand, X. Blase, S. Purcell, and L. Bocquet, to appear in Nature (2013)