Related papers: Tuning the permeability of dense membranes by shap…
We study the permeability and selectivity (`permselectivity') of model membranes made of polydisperse polymer networks for molecular penetrant transport, using coarse-grained, implicit-solvent computer simulations. The permeability…
Membranes regulate transport in a wide variety of industrial and biological applications. The microscale geometry of the membrane can significantly affect overall transport through the membrane, but the precise nature of this multiscale…
One of the most promising applications in nanoscience is the design of new materials to improve water permeability and selectivity of nanoporous membranes. Understanding the molecular architecture behind these fascinating structures and how…
Porous membranes are thin solid structures that allow the flow to pass through their tiny openings, called pores. Flow inertia may play a significant role in several filtration flows of natural and engineering interest. Here, we develop a…
Soft nanoparticles hold promise as smart emulsifiers due to their high degree of deformability, permeability and stimuli responsive properties. By means of large-scale simulations we investigate the structural properties of nanogels at…
For a wide range of modern soft functional materials the selective transport of sub-nanometer-sized molecules (`penetrants') through a stimuli-responsive polymeric membrane is key to the desired function. In this study, we investigate the…
In the popular solution-diffusion picture, the membrane permeability is defined as the product of the partition ratio and the diffusivity of penetrating solutes inside the membrane in the linear response regime, i.e., in equilibrium.…
Nanoscale materials are a promising desalination technology. While fast water flow in nanotubes is well understood, this is not the case for water permeability in single-layer membranes. The physical-chemical balance between nanopore size,…
Nanoplasmonics exploits the coupling between light and collective electron density oscillations (plasmons) to bypass the stringent limits imposed by diffraction. This coupling enables confinement of light to sub-wavelength volumes and is…
Membranes are ubiquitous in nature with primary functions that include adaptive filtering and selective transport of chemical and molecular species. Being critical to cellular functions, they are also fundamental in many areas of science…
In fluid transport across nanopores, there is a fundamental dissipation that arises from the connection between the pore and the macroscopic reservoirs. This entrance effect can hinder the whole transport in certain situations, for short…
Transport of liquid mixtures through porous membranes is central to processes such as desalination, chemical separations and energy harvesting, with ultrathin membranes made from novel 2D nanomaterials showing exceptional promise. Here we…
Understanding intrusion and extrusion in nanoporous materials is a challenging multiscale problem of utmost importance for applications ranging from energy storage and dissipation to water desalination and hydrophobic gating in ion…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…
Polymer materials with low water uptake exhibit a highly heterogeneous interior, characterized by water clusters in the form of nanodroplets and nanochannels. Here, based on our recent insights from computer simulations, we argue that water…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Tunable metasurfaces enable active and on-demand control over optical wavefronts through reconfigurable scattering of resonant nanostructures. Here, we present novel insights inspired by mechanical metamaterials to achieve giant tunability…
Many lipid membrane-mediated transport processes--such as mechanically-gated channel activation and solute transport--involve structural and dynamical features on membrane thickness length scales. Most existing membrane models, however,…
The world of nanoscales in fluidics is the frontier where the continuum of fluid mechanics meets the atomic, and even quantum, nature of matter. While water dynamics remains largely classical under extreme confinement, several experiments…
The permeability of certain polymer membranes with impenetrable nanoinclusions increases with the particle volume fraction (Merkel et al., Science, 296, 2002). This intriguing observation contradicts even qualitative expectations based on…