Seeing a need in the current literature, a professor from the University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering led his colleagues in authoring a review article on developments in the field of nanoengineering.
Dr. Hadi Ghasemi, an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering, is a lead author of “Transport Phenomena in Nano/Molecular Confinements,” which was published in ACS Nano on Nov. 30. His co-authors from the University of Houston are Masoumeh Nazari and postdoctoral fellow Ali Davoodabadi. Two additional authors were from Notre Dame – Dr. Tengfei Luo of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Dezhao Huang of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at Notre Dame
“To accelerate advancement in the field and to be able to bring this body of knowledge to practice, we felt that a review was needed at this time, and we were invited by ACS Nano to discuss the current understanding in this field and path forward,” Ghasemi said, explaining the need for the article and describing some of the new developments.
“The fluid flow in small channels is an omnipresent phenomenon in a wide spectrum of systems in nature and technologies, including the human body, plants, medical devices, energy and water systems, chemical processes and material synthesis. For example, brain ion channels govern our neural actions and so many other physiological behavior. With the advancement of new materials, we have been able to synthesize these nano/molecular channels artificially and examine liquid, gas and ion transport in these small geometries.”
Luo served as the lead author for his research group. Ghasemi noted that they had worked together on a previous article, “On interfacial viscosity in nanochannels,” published this year in Nanoscale.
“This is a collaborative work between my group and Dr. Tengfei Lu, who has strong expertise in simulation of fluid transport in these small dimensions,” Ghasemi said. “We have been working for a while and collaborated on a recently published article.”
Ghasemi leads the NanoTherm Research Group at UH. With the review article now published, Ghasemi said his group would continue its work on studying some of the smallest scales of life, although the implications are understandably large.
“The main theme of my research group is to understand physics at the nano/molecular scale, and explore this understanding to develop new technologies for a better quality of life for human beings,” he said. “For example, synthesis of artificial ion channels for humans, and the development of advanced thermal management systems for high performance electronics and photonics, among other fields.”