Related papers: Osmosis, from molecular insights to large-scale ap…
Reverse electrodialysis is a promising method to harvest the osmotic energy stored between seawater and freshwater, but it has been a long-standing challenge to fabricate permselective membranes with the power density surpassing the…
Transport is one of the most important physical processes in all energy and length scales. Ideal gases and hydrodynamics are, respectively, two opposite limits of transport. Here, we present an unexpected mathematical connection between…
The manipulation of micro- and nano-objects is of great technological significance to construct new materials, manipulate tiny amounts of liquids in fluidic systems, or detect minute concentrations of analytes. It is commonly approached by…
Adsorption is the accumulation of a solute at an interface that is formed between a solution and an additional gas, liquid, or solid phase. The macroscopic theory of adsorption dates back more than a century and is now well-established.…
A transient analysis for vesicle deformation under DC electric fields is developed. The theory extends from a droplet model, with the additional consideration of a lipid membrane separating two fluids of arbitrary properties. For the…
Compressible flow varies from ideal-gas behavior at high pressures where molecular interactions become important. Density is described through a cubic equation of state while enthalpy and sound speed are functions of both temperature and…
Understanding and exploiting the dynamics of complex nonlinear systems is nowadays at the core of a broad range of scientific and technological endeavors. Within the optical domain, light evolution in a nonlinear multimode environment…
Traditional models of electrokinetic transport in porous media are based on homogenized material properties, which neglect any macroscopic effects of microscopic fluctuations. This perspective is taken not only for convenience, but also…
Thermodynamics is commonly presented as a theory of macroscopic systems in stable equilibrium, built upon assumptions of extensivity and scaling with system size. In this paper, we present a universal formulation of the elementary…
Thermo-osmotic flows - flows generated in micro and nanofluidic systems by thermal gradients - could provide an alternative approach to harvest waste heat. However, such use would require massive thermo-osmotic flows, which are up to now…
It is argued that the van der Waals force exerted by the liquid and vapor/air on the molecules escaping from one phase into the other strongly affects the characteristics of evaporation. This is shown using two distinct descriptions of the…
Electroosmotic pumping of fluid through a nanopore that traverses an insulating membrane is considered. The density of surface charge on the membrane is assumed uniform, and sufficiently low for the Poisson-Boltzmann equation to be…
The forced intrusion of water in hydrophobic nanoporous pulverulent material is of interest for quick storage of energy. With nanometric pores the energy storage capacity is controlled by interfacial phenomena. With subnanometric pores, we…
In hydrodynamic descriptions of lipid bilayers, the membrane is often approximated as being impermeable to the surrounding, solute-containing fluid. However, biological and in vitro lipid membranes are influenced by their permeability and…
We introduce a model for ionic electrodiffusion and osmotic water flow through cells and tissues. The model consists of a system of partial differential equations for ionic concentration and fluid flow with interface conditions at deforming…
The adsorption behavior of ions at liquid-vapor interfaces exhibits several unexpected yet generic features. In particular, energy and entropy are both minimum when the solute resides near the surface, for a variety of ions in a range of…
Electrophoresis is the motion of particles relative to a surrounding fluid driven by a uniform electric field. In conventional electrophoresis, the electrophoretic velocity grows linearly with the applied field. Nonlinear effects with a…
To overcome the traditional paradigm of filtration, where separation is essentially performed upon steric sieving principles, we explore the concept of dynamic osmosis through active membranes. A partially permeable membrane presents a…
A vast concourse of events and phenomena occur in nature that may be interrelated by a entropy-maximization technique that provides a comprehensible explanation of a range of physical problems, integrating in a new framework the universal…
We consider a binary fluid mixture, which lies in the one-phase region near the demixing critical point, and study its transport through a capillary tube linking two large reservoirs. We assume that short-range interactions cause…