Molecular transport enhancement in purely metallic carbon nanotube porins

Published

June 27, 2024

Author(s)

Yuhao Li, Sidi Zhao, Rahul Prasanna Misra, Chenxing Liang, Alice Judith Gillen, jobaer abdullah, Ted Laurence, Jeffrey Fagan, Narayana Aluru, Daniel Blankschtein, Aleksandr Noy

Abstract

Nanofluidic channels impose extreme confinement on water and ions, giving rise to unusual transport phenomena that strongly depend on the interactions at the channel-wall interface. Yet, the questions of how the electronic properties of the nanofluidic channels influence their transport efficiency remain largely unexplored. Here, we measured transport through the inner pores of sub-1-nm metallic and semiconducting carbon nanotube porins of identical diameter. We found that water and proton transport were enhanced in metallic nanotubes over the semiconducting nanotubes, whereas ion transport was largely insensitive to the nanotube bandgap. Molecular simulations using polarizable force fields reveal the origins of these behaviors by highlighting different contributions of the anisotropic polarizability tensor of the carbon nanotubes to the ion-nanotube interactions and the water friction coefficient. We also describe the origin of the proton transport enhancement in metallic nanotubes using deep neural network molecular dynamics (DPMD) simulations. These results highlight the complex role of the electronic properties of nanofluidic channels in modulating transport under extreme nanoscale confinement.

Citation

Nature Materials

Volume

23

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01925-w

Local Download

Keywords

carbon nanotube, nanofluidics

Citation

Li, Y. , Zhao, S. , Misra, R. , Liang, C. , Gillen, A. , abdullah, J. , Laurence, T. , Fagan, J. , Aluru, N. , Blankschtein, D. and Noy, A. (2024), Molecular transport enhancement in purely metallic carbon nanotube porins, Nature Materials, [online], https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-024-01925-w, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=936619 (Accessed October 13, 2025)