Water and air pollutants have huge impacts on the entire living system. In addition, the newly emerging nanopollutants, increasing global warming, and consequent climate changes are posing major threats to the freshwater or fresh air availability. This has made it urgent to invent an appropriate water/air treatment technology that removes nanopollutants and also desalinates water to a significant extent. Carbon-based nanomaterials have generated marvelous interest in a wide range of research activities due to their high adsorption capacities. Carbon nanotubes, carbon nanotube bundles, and related materials have potential applications in gas/ion separation and water purification. Recently, gas/ion separation and water purification through carbon-based nanomaterials have received increasing attention. This review summarizes the properties of carbon nanotubes and carbon nanotube bundles related to gas separation, ion separation, and water purification using molecular dynamics simulations. Membranes-based carbon nanomaterials show promise of water purification and gas separation. These attractive properties of carbon nanotubes-based and carbon nanotube bundles-based nanomaterials make them proper candidates for gas separation, gas molecular-sieving processes, and desalination purposes in nanoscale dimensions.

During the past decade, the research on fluids in nanoconfined geometries has received considerable attention as a consequence of their wide applications in different fields. Several nanoconfined systems such as water and ionic liquids, together with an equally impressive array of nanoconfining media such as carbon nanotube, graphene and graphene oxide have received increasingly growing interest in the past years. Water is the first system that has been reviewed in this article, due to its important role in transport phenomena in environmental sciences. Water is often considered as a highly nanoconfined system, due to its reduction to a few layers of water molecules between the extended surface of large macromolecules. The second system discussed here is ionic liquids, which have been widely studied in the modern green chemistry movement. Considering the great importance of ionic liquids in industry, and also their oil/water counterpart, nanoconfined ionic liquid system has become an important area of research with many fascinating applications. Furthermore, the method of molecular dynamics simulation is one of the major tools in the theoretical study of water and ionic liquids in nanoconfinement, which increasingly has been joined with experimental procedures. In this way, the choice of water and ionic liquids in nanoconfinement is justified by applying molecular dynamics simulation approaches in this review article.

The positioning, adsorption, and movement of water on substrates is dependent upon the chemical nature and arrangement of the atoms of the surface. Therefore the behavior of water molecules on a substrate is a reflection of properties of the surface. Based on this premise, graphene and gold substrates were chosen to study this subject from a molecular perspective. In this work, the structural and dynamical behaviors of a water nanodroplet on Au (100) and the graphene interfaces have been studied by molecular dynamics simulation. The results have shown how the structural and dynamical behaviors of water molecules at the interface reflect the characteristics of these surfaces. The results have demonstrated that residence time and hydrogen bonds' lifetime at the water-Au (100) interface are bigger than at the water-graphene interface. Energy contour map analysis indicates a more uniform surface energy on graphene than on the gold surface. The obtained results illustrate that water clusters on gold and graphene form tetramer and hexamer structures, respectively. Furthermore, the water molecules are more ordered on the gold surface than on graphene. The study of hydrogen bonds showed that the order, stability, and the number of hydrogen bonds is higher on the gold surface. The positioning pattern of water molecules is also similar to the arrangement of gold atoms while no regularity was observed on graphene. The study of dynamical behavior of water molecules revealed that the movement of water on gold is much less than on graphene which is in agreement with the strong water-gold interaction in comparison to the water-graphene interaction.

No abstract

Gas transport through graphene-derived membranes has gained much interest recently due to its promising potential in filtration and separation applications. In this work, we explore Kr-85 gas radionuclide sequestration from natural air in nanoporous graphene oxide membranes in which different sizes and geometries of pores were modeled on the graphene oxide sheet. This was done using atomistic simulations considering mean-squared displacement, diffusion coefficient, number of crossed species of gases through nanoporous graphene oxide, and flow through interlayer galleries. The results showed that the gas features have the densest adsorbed zone in nanoporous graphene oxide, compared with a graphene membrane, and that graphene oxide was more favorable than graphene for Kr separation. The aim of this paper is to show that for the well-defined pore size called P-7, it is possible to separate Kr-85 from a gas mixture containing Kr-85, O 2 and N 2 . The results would benefit the oil industry among others.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract