Disjoining Pressure of Water in Nanochannels

TL;DR

This paper investigates the disjoining pressure of water in nanochannels through experiments and integrates the findings into computational models, enabling better simulation of nanoscale fluid phenomena.

Contribution

It provides experimental measurements of water disjoining pressure in nanochannels and incorporates these into continuum simulations for the first time.

Findings

Disjoining pressure reaches up to ~1.5 MPa in nanochannels.

Disjoining pressure decreases exponentially with increasing channel height.

Validated computational model incorporating experimental data.

Abstract

Experiments of water wicking in 1D silicon-dioxide nanochannels of heights 59 nm, 87 nm, 124 nm and 1015 nm are used to estimate the disjoining pressure of water which was found to be as high as ~1.5 MPa while exponentially decreasing with increasing channel height. Such a relation resulting from curve fitting of experimentally-derived data was implemented and validated in computational fluid dynamics. This methodology integrates experimental nanoscale physics into continuum simulations thus enabling the numerical study of various phenomena where disjoining pressure plays an important role.