Li Ji, Long Rui, Zhang Bo, Yang Ronggui, Liu Wei, Liu Zhichun
School of Energy and Power Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
J Phys Chem Lett. 2020 Nov 19;11(22):9856-9861. doi: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.0c02475. Epub 2020 Nov 10.
Heat pumps are widely used in domestic applications, agriculture, and industry. Here, we report a novel heat pump based on the reverse thermo-osmosis (RTO) effect in a nanoporous graphene (NPG) membrane. Through classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, we prove that the heat pump can transport mass and heat efficiently. The heat and mass fluxes are increased linearly with the hydraulic pressure provided. Ultrahigh heat fluxes of 6.2 ± 1.0 kW/cm and coefficient of performance (COP) of 20.2 are obtained with a temperature increment of 5 K and a working pressure of 80 MPa. It is interesting that water molecules on the NPG membrane can evaporate in a cluster state, and the cluster evaporations reduce the vaporization enthalpy of the processes.
