Osmotically-driven membrane processes, including forward osmosis (FO) and pressure retarded osmosis (PRO), are emerging technologies that have come under renewed interest and subjected to numerous investigations in recent years. In FO, water is extracted from a feed solution utilizing the high osmotic pressure of a concentrated draw solution (DS) that flows on the opposite side of an FO membran...

An analytical model is presented for electro-osmotic flow through a wide rectangular microchannel rotating about an axis perpendicular to its own. The flow is driven by a steady electric field applied along the channel axis, where the upper and lower walls are charged with uniform but possibly disparate zeta potentials. The aim is to understand the interaction between Coriolis force, pressure g...

Poly(acrylic acid)-based hydrogels can swell up to 100-1000 times their own weight in desalinated water due to osmotic forces. As the swelling is about a factor of 2-12 lower in seawater-like saline solutions (4.3 wt% NaCl) than in deionized water, cyclic swelling, and shrinking can potentially be used to move a piston in an osmotic motor. Consequently, chemical energy is translated into mechan...

The response of lipid bilayers to osmotic stress is an important part of cellular function. Recent experimental studies showed that when cell-sized giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) are exposed to hypotonic media, they respond to the osmotic assault by undergoing a cyclical sequence of swelling and bursting events, coupled to the membrane's compositional degrees of freedom. Here, we establish a...

A nonautonomous system, i.e. a system driven by an external force, is usually considered as being phase synchronized with this force. In such a case, the dynamical behavior is conveniently studied in an extended phase space which is the product of the phase space R of the undriven system by an extra dimension associated with the external force. The analysis is then performed by taking advantage...

Abstract Persistent dynamics in colloidal glasses suggest the existence of a non-equilibrium driving force for structural relaxation during glassy aging. But implicit assumption literature that form within metastable state bypasses search vitrification and aging its connection with state. The natural relation osmotic pressure to number-density gradients motivates us investigate as this force. W...

We investigate experimentally the electrokinetic properties of soft nanofluidic channels that consist in soap films with nanometric thickness, covered with charged surfactants. Both the electric and fluidic responses of the system are measured under an applied voltage drop along the film. The electric field is shown to induce an electro-osmotic hydrodynamic flow in the film. However, in contras...

Defining global themes such as Urban Policy, Sustainability, and even the Right to City (RTTC) is fundamental stimulating establishing a continuous dialogue with scientific community, mainly in social sciences. Thus, understanding dynamics around scope of urban sustainability requires an analysis that focused on multiple realities. Taking holistic view Brazilian this entry looks at historical c...