Atom-thin graphene water pipes
Narrowest ever capillaries fit only single water molecules while salts are excluded
At the height of a single carbon atom, graphene capillaries made by an international team of researchers might be the tiniest pipes ever made. The conduits are so narrow that only water molecules – but not even the smallest salt ions – fit through. Scaled up, they might be ideal desalination membranes.
‘We wanted to mimic the size of natural protein channels called aquaporins, which control the movement of water through cell walls,’ says Radha Boya from the University of Manchester, UK, who led the work together with graphene discoverer Andre Geim.