Non-Negligible Roles of Pore Size Distribution on Electroosmotic Flow in Nanoporous Materials

Electroosmotic flow in nanoporous materials is of fundamental importance for the design and development of filtration membranes and electrochemical devices such as supercapacitors and batteries. Recent experiments suggest that ion transport in a porous network is substantially different from that in individual nanochannels due to the pore size distribution and pore connectivity. Herein, we report a theoretical framework for ion transport in nanoporous materials by combing the classical density functional theory to describe the electrical double layer (EDL) structure, the Navier Stokes equation for the fluid flow, and the effective medium approximation to bridge the gap between individual nanopores and the network connectivity. We find that ion conductivity in nanoporous materials is extremely sensitive to the pore size distribution when the average size of micropores is comparable to the EDL thickness. The theoretical predictions provide an explanation of the giant gap between the conductivity of a single pore and that of a porous network and highlight the mechanism of ion transport through nanoporous materials important for numerous practical applications.