Evaporation studies focus on the identification and characterization of heat transfer and flow dynamics in the vicinity of the solid-liquid-vapor contact line. The meniscus is often characterized by the following three regions: non-evaporating adsorbed layer, thin-film, and capillary regions. The adsorbed layer, which has a thickness on the order of nanometers, is traditionally believed to be...
Wicking is the spontaneous imbibition due to the negative capillary pressure created at the liquid-air interface [1]. The wicking of simple fluids, such as water and organic solvents is well understood for a long time [2]. This well defined situation becomes more complicated in the case of complex fluids with an internal structure on the nanoscale. Then, competitive wetting and confinement...
NMR relaxation time measurement is a well-known, non-destructive method to probe all states of protonic liquid such as water, in porous media, at different pore scales. In contrast with MRI which can get local information but is blind with respect to most liquid in nanomaterials, standard NMR relaxation measurements can provide information on the liquid content over six decades of relaxation...
Imbibition is important physics in nanoporous media, related to many energy and technology areas, e.g., fuel cells, water desalinization, bio-sensor, hydrology, hydrocarbon recovery, CO2 geo-storage, underground hydrogen storage, etc. The classic theory to describe the spontaneous imbibition dynamics is the Lucas-Washburn (L-W) equation, while the classic theory to describe the...
Many applications of nanoporous materials require their porosity to be filled with liquid. This is notably the case in heterogenous catalysis or in electrochemistry. In all cases, it is essential to determine whether the porosity is uniformly filled or whether the liquid is excluded from specific pores. In a macroscopic context, wetting is well predicted in terms of the different energies of...
Water condensation and evaporation from saline porous materials has attracted the attention of scientists for years due to a large field of applications: salt weathering of buildings, desalination of water, CO2 sequestration, soil decontamination, etc… [1, 2, 3]. A complete understanding of related nanoscale processes is however lacking, in particular concerning the coupling between...
In recent years, substantial research and development endeavors are dedicated to enhancing the performance of polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFC) as a promising candidate for transport application. However, the power density still needs improvement for large-scale operations with one of the core issues being water management. The convoluted water balance in the PEFC requires proper water...
Radioactive waste arising from the production and use of radioactive materials calls for a sustainable waste management system which guarantees long-term safety to human and environment. To this end, a multi-barrier deep geological storage system consisting of both natural geological formations and engineered barriers has been proposed by several countries as a viable concept to store...
A lot of processes in applied sciences based on surface chemistry phenomena utilise porous solid materials to increase the accessible surface area. For instance, a mesoporous silica MCM-41 is used as new drug delivery systems for ibuprofen, a more sustainable solution for separation of ethane from natural gas and a heterogeneous catalyst in hydrogenation of benzene. In all of these systems...
Ionic Liquid Crystals (ILCs) are materials that combine the properties of liquid crystals with the ionic conduction similar to ionic liquids. It’s known that liquid crystalline mesophases under nanoconfinement exhibit anomalous dynamics and phase behavior. Here, we investigate the dynamics, and phase behavior of a guanidinium based ionic liquid crystal confined in self-ordered nanoporous...
Cellulose, the world's most abundant natural, renewable, biodegradable polymer, is a major component of plants, wood, paper, textiles or other industrial materials. A remarkable property of cellulose-based materials is that they can absorb huge amounts of water (typically 25% of the dry mass) from ambient vapor, in the form of bound water confined at a nanoscale in the amorphous regions of the...
Detailed insight into the structure and electrokinetic transport of electrolyte solutions in nanoconfinement is hard to obtain. Experimental techniques are often either limited in their accessible resolution or their interpretation relies on models and assumptions that may not hold in nanoconfinement. Molecular simulations can in principle provide such insights, but the simulation results...
Microemulsions are thermodynamically stable solutions composed of water, oil, and amphiphilic components such as a surfactant. They show a fascinating variety of structures and properties that have been explored over the past few decades. Numerous applications in areas such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, enhanced oil recovery, the food industry and many more make the relevance of this research...
Flow through micro-nano channels is ubiquitous in nature, such as flow inside biological nano-porins in all living beings, vascular motion in fungi, and intestinal flow due to contractions of walls. It is also present in a vast range of engineering and biomedical applications like nanorobotics, printing technology, quantum computing, optics, chemical process control, drug delivery, and cell...
Adsorption of CO2-CH4 binary mixtures in permeable media plays an important role in CO2-enhanced shale gas recovery and geological storage of CO2. Grand Canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulations enable the examination of the physics of adsorption in nanopores with high fidelity. GCMC tracks the motion of every molecule, which results in computational expense that rises rapidly with domain size....
Natural gas hydrate (NGH) is considered as a type of potential clean energy resource concentrated in permafrost layers and deep ocean floors. The hydrate reservoirs in South China Sea (SCS) have small pore size (0.1 μm -100 μm) and extremely low intrinsic permeability (about 5 mD). and the grains mainly range from clayey silt to silt. Permeability is one of the most decisive parameters in...
The discovery of chlorides and perchlorates has profoundly influenced our view of liquid water on Mars [1,2]. These salts attract much attention, because their hygroscopic nature and low eutectic temperature allow for the possibility of liquid water on the surface of Mars today. Recent studies showed the confined space exert significant effect on the phase boundary on salt solution, particular...
The transport of solutes in partially and fully saturated nanoporous media such as compacted clays and tight rocks is a very fundamental process related to contaminant transport in groundwater and radionuclide migration in the context of nuclear waste disposal. Specifically, the charged surfaces of minerals induce an electrical double layer (EDL) in the electrolyte by the long-range Coulomb...
CO2 capture and storage (CCS) is one of the indispensable decarbonization technologies to achieve green industrial growth and address the challenge of global climate change. CO2 captured using the Sorption Enhance Water Gas Shift process at steel mills contains H2, with its molar ratio reaching 10% or higher. Since the thermophysical properties of CO2 and H2 are distinctly different, the...
