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Nanowire liquid pumps

Nature Nanotechnology volume 8, pages 277–281 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

The ability to form tiny droplets of liquids1,2,3,4,5,6 and control their movements7,8,9,10 is important in printing or patterning1,2, chemical reactions10,11,12 and biological assays9,10,13,14. So far, such nanofluidic15,16 capabilities have principally used components such as channels9,10, nozzles1,6 or tubes17,18,19,20,21,22, where a solid encloses the transported liquid. Here, we show that liquids can flow along the outer surface of solid nanowires at a scale of attolitres per second and the process can be directly imaged with in situ transmission electron microscopy. Microscopy videos show that an ionic liquid can be pumped along tin dioxide, silicon or zinc oxide nanowires as a thin precursor film or as beads riding on the precursor film. Theoretical analysis suggests there is a critical film thickness of ∼10 nm below which the liquid flows as a flat film and above which it flows as discrete beads. This critical thickness is the result of intermolecular forces between solid and liquid, which compete with liquid surface energy and Rayleigh–Plateau instability.

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Figure 1: Ionic liquid beads and flat precursor film.
Figure 2: Modelling and simulations.
Figure 3: Transport and patterning of liquids by nanowire.
Figure 4: Nanowire network nanofluidics.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and by the Science of Precision Multifunctional Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage (NEES), an Energy Frontier Research Centre funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) under award DESC0001160. This work was performed, in part, at the Sandia-Los Alamos Centre for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), a US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences user facility. Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogramme laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, for the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (under contract no. DE-AC04-94AL85000). Y.C.L., J.J.N., A.K., X.F.Q. and J.L. acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation (NSF; grant DMR-1120901). J.Y.H. thanks Chongmin Wang and Wu Xu for providing the ionic liquid and the SnO2 nanowires. L.Z. and S.X.M. acknowledge support from the NSF (grant CMMI 08 010934) through University of Pittsburgh.

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Author notes

  1. Jian Yu Huang and Yu-Chieh Lo: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Integrated Nanotechnologies, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, 87185, New Mexico, USA

    Jian Yu Huang

  2. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Yu-Chieh Lo, Jun Jie Niu, Akihiro Kushima, Xiaofeng Qian & Ju Li

  3. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 19104, Pennsylvania, USA

    Yu-Chieh Lo

  4. Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, 15261, Pennsylvania, USA

    Li Zhong & Scott X. Mao

  5. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Centre for Electron Microscopy, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Scott X. Mao

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Contributions

J.Y.H. and J.L. conceived and designed the experiments. J.Y.H., A.K. and L.Z. performed the in situ TEM experiments. Y.C.L. and J.L. carried out modelling and simulations. L.Z. and S.X.M. performed TEM imaging analysis. J.J.N. and Y.C.L. performed the optical microscopy experiment. J.J.N., A.K. and X.F.Q. also contributed to the Supplementary Information. Y.C.L., J.Y.H. and J.L. wrote the paper. All authors analysed the data, discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ju Li.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary information

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Huang, J., Lo, YC., Niu, J. et al. Nanowire liquid pumps. Nature Nanotech 8, 277–281 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2013.41

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