The electric double layer (EDL) at the interface between electrolytes and charged surfaces significantly affects the performance of fuel cells, batteries, biologically-relevant ion-selective channels, supercapacitors, desalination, other electrokinetic, and electrochemical and bioanalytical processes. Comparing with the microscale, researchers are still studying fundamental details of the EDL in nanofluidic channels, especially in the case of multivalent and finite ion sizes. Knowing that the thickness of EDL depends on the concentration of the solution and the surface charge. We performed the current monitoring (CM) experiment with the complex trivalent species to probe the zeta potential and the structure of the EDL in the nanochannel. Due to the charge inversion occurs with large, trivalent ions, we performed the modified current monitoring experiments to explore the complex phenomena. In our research, we are building a nanochannel to explore the axial and transverse structure of the EDL and complex phenomena like charge inversion and non-linear current monitoring.
Reference:
[1] Chou, K. H., McCallum, C., Gillespie, D., & Pennathur, S. (2018). An experimental approach to systematically probe charge inversion in nanofluidic channels. Nano letters, 18(2), 1191-1195.