Advanced fuel design through integration of chemistries leading to different components: alcohols (blue); ethers (green); and olefins, parafins, and aromatics (yellow).
Being able to manipulate mass flow is critically important in a variety of physical processes in chemical and biomolecular science. For example, separation and catalytic systems, which requires precise control of mass diffusion, are crucial in the manufacturing of chemicals, crystal growth of semiconductors, waste recovery of biological solutes or chemicals, and production of artificial kidneys. Coordinate transformations and metamaterials are powerful methods to achieve precise manipulation of molecular diffusion. Here, we introduce a novel approach to obtain mass separation based on metamaterials that can sort chemical and biomolecular species by cloaking one compound while concentrating the other. A design strategy to realize such metamaterial using homogeneous isotropic materials is proposed. We present a practical case where a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen is manipulated using a metamaterial that cloaks nitrogen and concentrates oxygen. This work lays the foundation for molecular mass separation in biophysical and chemical systems through metamaterial devices.
Recent advances in the design of metamaterials that control diffusive transport processes have enabled efficient devices to manipulate heat conduction. In contrast, control of mass diffusion with metamaterial devices has been largely unexplored. Mass diffusion is critically important in multiple research areas ranging from electronic and energy materials to chemical and biological systems. In this work, we introduce a physical approach to design mass diffusion metamaterial devices that take into account the fundamental physical mechanisms behind mass transport. We demonstrate that mass concentration discontinuities arising from different material solubilities are critical physical factors that need to be incorporated for the accurate design and characterization of mass diffusion metamaterial devices. We employ our approach to devise and analyze cloaking and focusing of molecules and show how the difference in solubilities is critically important for the efficiency of the metamaterials. This work provides physical insights and guidelines to understand and design mass diffusion in metamaterial devices.
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