At the nanometer scale, the transport of mass and momentum departs from what is commonly observed at macroscopic scales and it is dominated by thermal fluctuations. The noisy nature of the fluid motion, coupled to the nanometric confinement and to chemical reactions, leads to phenomena that have no counterpart at the macroscale. The transport of reactive mixtures under nanoscopic confinement is of particular interest because it is often encountered in fuel cells, nanoreactors and within eukaryotic cells and bacteria. Understanding and controlling these nanoscale phenomena can open the way for technological breakthroughs.
In our group we address these problems by investigating how thermal noise, fluid flow and mass transport impact the efficiency of chemical reactions in biological and bio-inspired nanoreactors. To do so, we develop theoretical models and numerical methods to study nanoscale transport phenomena. By combining simplified reduced-order modelling and three dimensional direct numerical simulations, our multiphysics approach enables us to study nanoreactors over several time and length scales.