Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology have revealed a revolutionary method of pumping fluid at the nanoscale level that has potential use for desalinating water and lab-on-a-chip devices. They have developed a simple, highly accurate model to predict fluid movement for highly confined fluids and to then use this knowledge to drive flow without mechanical pumping or the use of electrodes. “Conventional fluid dynamics modelling works perfectly with things we can see such as the flow of air over an aircraft,” Swinburne’s Professor Billy Todd said. “But when devices get to nanometre size or 1 billionth of a metre – about one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair – the fundamental assumptions of fluid mechanics break down. It is difficult to force fluid to flow in confined dimensions that are just a few atoms thick.” Professor Todd is Chair of the Department of Mathematics in the Faculty of Science Engineering and Technology at Swinburne. Together with colleagues at Swinburne, RMIT and Roskilde University in Denmark, he has applied ideas from mathematics and physics, and used supercomputers to look at what happens at the interface between the solid surface and the fluid at nanometre dimensions. “Several years ago, researchers in
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