Source: website of Nature magazine
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been widely used in seawater desalination because of their extraordinary water transport speed. However, the water transport mechanism behind CNTs has not been fully characterized, which reflects the difficulty of measuring the permeability of a single nanotube. Now, Lyd ric Bocquet and colleagues have shown (Nature 2916, 537, 210) that the permeability of a single nanotube can be accurately determined by observing the hydrodynamics of a water jet coming out of a single nanotube into the surrounding fluid. The measured results show that there is a large area of radius-dependent wall slip in CNTs, but not in BN nanotubes. This distinctive difference stems from the subtle differences in atomic scale between the two solid-liquid interfaces, suggesting that nanofluids are the frontier of the continuum spectra of hydrodynamics against the view of atomic matter.