Macroscopic Length Scale of Water Super-Transport in Single Ultralong Carbon Nanotube

Abstract

Abstract The emergent nanofluidics promotes the exploration of the special hydrodynamics of fluid transport in a nano-sized flow domain1–3. Water, the most common fluid in the nature and human society, will form the ordered structures4–7 by reducing the hydrogen bonding and transport ultra-fast in carbon nanotubes8–16. However, such behaviors have only been reported in the tubes with nano- or micro-meter lengths far away from what can be considered as the macroscopic scales. Here we establish a mass spectroscopy system to detect the super-transport of water and heavy water in individual ultralong carbon nanotubes with an enhancement ratio ε over 106, two orders of magnitude higher than previous results. It indicates that the physics behind water super-transport is still efficient in a macroscopic length scale, where the effects of entrance/exit losses, surface energies, and temperature on the water super-transport can also be evaluated. Such a long transport system will reduce the contribution of entrance/exit effect to the total pressure drop to approach the intrinsic slippage resistance. This work not only extends the super-transport property of nanofluidics into macroscopic length scale, but also provide new hope to detect the intrinsic ultra-low friction on solid-liquid interface for a lossless mass transport in macroscopic applications.