Physicists have finally solved the long-standing mystery of why water moves faster through narrower nanotubes.
Whenever you get around to doing dishes, how easily water slides down a dirty plate depends on how uneven and crusty the plate’s surface is. At the nanoscale, however, where surface features can be hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the average width of a human hair, water can experience friction even on surfaces that seem perfectly smooth.
“20 years ago there was an experiment with water flowing across a membrane made of carbon nanotubes that was quite disturbing. It showed extremely fast water flows,” says Lydéric Bocquet, physicist at CNRS and the new study’s co-author. “We started an experimental program to measure the flow of water inside a single nanotube and ended up with the same result. But we could not explain it.
This electronic, quantum friction has been previously studied for metal surfaces, but calculating it in detail has always been challenging, says Wenjie Dou, a physicist at Westlake University in China who was uninvolved in the study. “Calculating the exact [form] of electronic friction will always be very intense,” he says, adding that many of physicists’ favorite mathematical tricks and approximations fail in this case.
Although this is an advance in theoretical physics, the study does have obvious real-world implications. For example, understanding flows through carbon nanotubes could improve water desalination processes, says Jeffrey Sokoloff, a physicist at Northeastern University who was not part of the study. “There’s a lot of friction experienced by the water as it goes through the filters.
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