Related papers: Chapter: Energy conversion at water-solid interfac…
On the assumption that experimentally validated tabulated thermodynamic properties of saturated fluids published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology are accurate, a theoretical thermodynamic cycle can be demonstrated that…
Polarization of the interface, spontaneously occurring when water is in contact with hydrophobic solutes or air, couples with the uniform external field to produce a non-zero force acting on a suspended particle. This force exists even in…
Thermo-osmosis refers to fluid migration due to temperature gradient. The mechanistic understanding of thermo-osmosis in charged nano-porous media is still incomplete, while it is important for several environmental and energy applications,…
Current approaches for electric power generation from nanoscale conducting or semi-conducting layers in contact with moving aqueous droplets are promising as they show efficiencies of around 30 percent, yet, even the most successful ones…
With the progress of nano-technology, thermodynamics also has to be scaled down, calling for specific protocols to extract and measure work. Usually, such protocols involve the action of an external, classical field (the battery) of…
In this paper, we introduce a diffuse interface model for describing the dynamics of mixtures involving multiple (two or more) phases. The coupled hydrodynamical system is derived through an energetic variational approach. The total energy…
In classical thermodynamics energy always flows from the hotter system to the colder one. However, if these systems are initially correlated, the energy flow can reverse, making the cold system colder and the hot system hotter. This…
Electrical circuits with transient elements can be good examples of systems where non--steady irreversible processes occur, so in the same way as a steady state energy converter, we use the formal construction of the first order…
Living cells and tissues can generate complex patterns of electric fields and fluid flows which can play important role in physiology. Both, fields and flows are rooted in ion transport across biological interfaces: cell membranes and…
Active systems evade the rules of equilibrium thermodynamics by constantly dissipating energy at the level of their microscopic components. This energy flux stems from the conversion of a fuel, present in the environment, into sustained…
Irreversible effects in thermoelectric materials limit their efficiency and economy for applications in power generation and refrigeration. While electron transport is unavoidably irreversible in bulk materials, here we derive conditions…
We investigate electro-osmosis in aqueous solutions of polyelectrolytes using mean-field equations. A solution of positively charged polyelectrolytes is confined between two negatively charged planar surfaces, and an electric field is…
Metamaterials provide exceptional control over physical phenomena, enabling many disruptive technologies. However, researches in hydrodynamic meta-devices have mainly used intrusive methods to manipulate material structures, limited by…
The origin of the apparent negative charge at hydrophobic-water interfaces has fueled one of the biggest debates in physical chemistry for several decades. The most common interpretation given to explain this observation is that negatively…
The nonlinear electrokinetic response of ionic solutions is important in nanofluidics. However, quantitatively understanding the mechanisms is still a challenging problem because of a lack of analytic approaches. Here, a general framework…
First we discuss some early work of Ulrike Feudel on structure formation in nonlinear reactions including ions and the efficiency of the conversion of chemical into electrical energy. Then we give some survey about energy conversion from…
Electrokinetic energy conversion provides a scheme for energy harvesting and storage for on-chip applications. However, the major drawback of electrokinetic energy conversion is its low conversion efficiency. Researchers are in a quest to…
Recent experimental developments showed that the use of the radiation pressure, induced by a continuous laser wave, to control fluid-fluid interface deformations at the microscale, represents a very promising alternative to electric or…
Correlation effects arising during liquid infiltration into hydrophobic porous medium are considered. On the basis of these effects a mechanism of energy absorption at filling porous medium by nonwetting liquid is suggested. In accordance…
While fluids near a solid surface are at the core of applications in energy storage/conversion, electrochemistry/electrowetting and adsorption/catalysis, their nanoscale behavior remains only partially deciphered. Beyond conventional…