Tunable Anion-Selective Transport through Monolayer Graphene and Hexagonal Boron Nitride.

Membranes that selectively filter for both anions and cations are central to technological applications from clean energy generation to desalination devices. 2D materials have immense potential as these ion-selective membranes due to their thinness, mechanical strength, and tunable surface chemistry; however, currently, only cation-selective membranes have been reported. Here we demonstrate the controllable cation and anion selectivity of both monolayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride. In particular, we measure the ionic current through membranes grown by chemical vapor deposition containing well-known defects inherent to scalably produced and wet-transferred 2D materials. We observe a striking change from cation selectivity with monovalent ions to anion selectivity by controlling the concentration of multivalent ions and inducing charge inversion on the 2D membrane. Furthermore, we find good agreement between our experimental data and theoretical predictions from the Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz equation and use this model to extract selectivity ratios. These tunable selective membranes conduct up to 500 anions for each cation and thus show potential for osmotic power generation

Giant Fluctuations Induced by Thermal Diffusion in Complex Liquids

The GRADFLEX experiment of ESA has shown that under microgravity conditions a stationary thermodiffusion process is accompanied by giant non-equilibrium fluctuations with size as large as the size of the sample. In the presence of small concentration gradients, the features of the non-equilibrium fluctuations can be described by means of linearized hydrodynamics. However, the linear models are not suitable to describe most cases of applicative interest, such as fluctuations induced by large gradients and under non-stationary conditions. Moreover, presently the investigation of non-equilibrium fluctuations has mainly involved single component fluids and binary mixtures, but recently transport processes in ternary mixtures have attracted increasing interest due to the experiments performed on the International Space Station in the framework of the DCMIX project of ESA. The Giant Fluctuations (NEUF-DIX) project of ESA will investigate non-equilibrium fluctuations during diffusive processes occurring in complex multi-component mixtures, where one of the components is a macromolecule, such as a polymer, a colloid or a protein. Important objectives will be the exploration of the features of the fluctuations under non-ideal conditions, such as large gradients, transient processes, and concentrated samples, and the understanding of how the fluctuations affect the interactions between macromolecules. The project involves the development of a dedicated facility, consisting of an array of shadowgraph optical instruments working in parallel, each one equipped with a thermal gradient cell. Here we outline the design concept of the facility and the results of performance tests performed on a breadboard to evaluate the suitability of the designed instrument to carry out scientific measurements of non-equilibrium concentration fluctuations in space