Thermally-Targeted Adsorption And Enrichment In Micro-scale Hydrothermal Pore Environments

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how thermally-driven chaotic advection in micro-scale hydrothermal environments can selectively transport and enrich chemical compounds at specific locations, offering insights into prebiotic chemistry and robust biochemical process design.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mechanism of thermally-activated chaotic advection for targeted chemical enrichment, with potential applications in origin-of-life studies and biochemical engineering.

Findings

Thermally actuated chaos can direct chemical compounds to specific locations.

Micro-scale flows can be designed for robust biochemical processing.

Chaotic advection may explain biomolecular complexity emergence.

Abstract

The unique ability of chaotic advection under micro-scale confinement to direct chemical processes along accelerated kinetic pathways has long been recognized. But practical applications have been slow to emerge because optimal results are often counter-intuitively achieved in flows that appear to possess undesirably high disorder. Here we demonstrate how thermally actuated chaotic phenomena within these microenvironments are capable of establishing a continuous conveyor transporting chemical compounds from the bulk to targeted locations on solid boundaries where they become greatly enriched. These findings intriguingly suggest that microscale chaotic advection may offer a new- mechanism to explain emergence of biomolecular complexity from dilute organic precursors in the prebiotic milieu-a key unanswered question in the origin of life. We further show how these flows can be rationally designed and harnessed to execute bulk biochemical processes with a level of robustness previously thought unattainable.