Lee, W-C and Ronghe, A and Villalobos, LF and Huang, S and Dakhchoune, M and Mensi, M and Hsu, K-J and Ayappa, KG and Agrawal, KV (2022) Enhanced Water Evaporation from à -Scale Graphene Nanopores. In: ACS Nano .
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Abstract
Enhancing the kinetics of liquid-vapor transition from nanoscale confinements is an attractive strategy for developing evaporation and separation applications. The ultimate limit of confinement for evaporation is an atom thick interface hosting angstrom-scale nanopores. Herein, using a combined experimental/computational approach, we report highly enhanced water evaporation rates when angstrom sized oxygen-functionalized graphene nanopores are placed at the liquid-vapor interface. The evaporation flux increases for the smaller nanopores with an enhancement up to 35-fold with respect to the bare liquid-vapor interface. Molecular dynamics simulations reveal that oxygen-functionalized nanopores render rapid rotational and translational dynamics to the water molecules due to a reduced and short-lived water-water hydrogen bonding. The potential of mean force (PMF) reveals that the free energy barrier for water evaporation decreases in the presence of nanopores at the atomically thin interface, which further explains the enhancement in evaporation flux. These findings can enable the development of energy-efficient technologies relying on water evaporation.
| Item Type: | Journal Article |
|---|---|
| Publication: | ACS Nano |
| Publisher: | American Chemical Society |
| Additional Information: | The copyright for this article belongs to American Chemical Society. |
| Keywords: | Energy efficiency; Evaporation; Free energy; Graphene; Hydrogen bonds; Liquids; Molecular oxygen; Molecules; Nanopores, Attractive strategies; Computational approach; Enhancement; Evaporation flux; Evaporation kinetics; Graphene nanopore; Liquid-vapor interface; Liquid-vapor transitions; Nanoscale confinement; Water evaporation, Molecular dynamics |
| Department/Centre: | Division of Mechanical Sciences > Chemical Engineering |
| Date Deposited: | 05 Oct 2022 06:04 |
| Last Modified: | 05 Oct 2022 06:04 |
| URI: | https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/77038 |
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