Water management in a hydrogen polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cell is critical for performance. The impact of thermal conductivity and water vapor diffusion coefficients in a gas diffusion layer (GDL) has been studied by a mathematical model. The fraction of product water that is removed in the vapour phase through the GDL as a function of GDL properties and operating conditions has been calculated and discussed. Furthermore, the current model enables identification of conditions when condensation occurs in each GDL component and calculation of temperature gradient across the interface between different layers, providing insight into the overall mechanism of water transport in a given cell design. Water transport mode and condensation conditions in the GDL components depend on the combination of water vapor diffusion coefficients and thermal conductivities of the GDL components. Different types of GDL and water removal scenarios have been identified and related to experimentally-determined GDL properties.
The growth of wafer-scale and uniform monoclinic VO2 film was a challenge if considering the multivalent vanadium atom and the various phase structures of VO2 compound. Directly oxidizing metallic vanadium film in oxygen gas seemed to be an easy way, while the oxidation parameters were extremely sensitive due to the critical preparation window. Here we proposed a facile thermal oxidation by water-vapor to produce wafer-scale VO2 films with high quality. Results indicated that by using the water-vapor oxidant, the temperature window for VO2 growth was greatly broadened. In addition, the obtaine…
Protons at the water/vapor interface are relevant for atmospheric and environmental processes, yet to characterize their surface affinity on the quantitative level is still challenging. Here we utilize phase-sensitive sum-frequency vibrational spectroscopy to quantify the surface density of protons (or their hydronium form) at the intrinsic water/vapor interface, through inspecting the surface-field-induced alignment of water molecules in the electrical double layer of ions. With hydrogen halides in water, the surface adsorption of protons is found to be independent of specific proton-halide a…
A new difference-frequency method based on electro-optic phase modulators and two free-running lasers is reported to perform THz dual-comb spectroscopy.
Among the many existing molecular models of water, the MB-pol many-body potential has emerged as a remarkably accurate model, capable of reproducing thermodynamic, structural, and dynamic properties across water's solid, liquid, and vapor phases. In this work, we assessed the performance of MB-pol with respect to an important set of properties related to vapor-liquid coexistence and interfacial behavior. Through direct coexistence classical molecular dynamics simulations at temperatures 400 K < T < 600 K, we calculated properties such as equilibrium coexistence densities, vapor-liquid interfac…
The structure and dynamics of the water/vapor interface is revisited by means of path-integral and second-generation Car-Parrinello ab-initio molecular dynamics simulations in conjunction with an instantaneous surface definition [A. P. Willard and D. Chandler, J. Phys. Chem. B 114, 1954 (2010)]. In agreement with previous studies, we find that one of the OH bonds of the water molecules in the topmost layer is pointing out of the water into the vapor phase, while the orientation of the underlying layer is reversed. Therebetween, an additional water layer is detected, where the molecules are ali…
Gaseous mixtures of water vapor and neutral molecules of salt (e.g., NaCl, CuCl etc.) can be highly non-ideal due to the strong attractive interaction between salt and water molecules. In particular, this can result in high solubility of salts in water vapor and a strong dependence of solubility on vapor pressure. The analysis of salt solubility in water vapor can be done using the Pitzer-Pabalan model, which is based on the thermodynamic theory of imperfect gases. The original Pitzer-Pabalan work demonstrated that one can reproduce experimental data for NaCl solubility in vapor. No analysis w…
We report the creation of a confined slow beam of heavy-water (D2O) molecules with a translational temperature around 1 kelvin. This is achieved by filtering slow D2O from a thermal ensemble with inhomogeneous static electric fields exploiting the quadratic Stark shift of D2O. All previous demonstrations of electric field manipulation of cold dipolar molecules rely on a predominantly linear Stark shift. Further, on the basis of elementary molecular properties and our filtering technique we argue that our D2O beam contains molecules in only a few ro-vibrational states.
Evaporative mass flux is governed by interfacial state of liquid and vapor phases. For closely similar pressures and mass fluxes of liquid water into its own vapor, discontinuity between interfacial liquid and vapor temperatures in the range of 0.14-28 K is reported. This controversial discontinuity has resulted in an obstacle on understanding and theoretical modeling of evaporation. Here, through study of vapor transport by Boltzmann transport equation solved through Direct Simulation Monte Carlo Method, we demonstrated that the measured discontinuities were strongly affected by boundary cond…
Infrared (IR) multiple-angle incidence resolution spectrometry (IR-MAIRS) is a recently developed spectroscopic technique that combines oblique incidence transmission measurements and chemometrics (multivariate analysis) to obtain both pure in-plane (IP) and out-of-plane (OP) vibration spectra for a thin sample. IR-MAIRS is established for analyzing the molecular orientation of organic thin films at atmospheric pressure, but it should also be powerful for the structural characterization of vapor-deposited thin samples prepared in a vacuum. The application of IR-MAIRS to vapor-deposited amorpho…
Water is the most common substance on Earth.The discovery of heavy water and its further study have shown that the change of hydrogen for deuterium leads to the significant differences in their properties.The triple point temperature of heavy water is higher,at the same time the critical temperature is lower.Experimental values of the second virial coefficient of the EOS for the vapor of normal and heavy water differ at all temperatures.This fact can influence the values of the dimerization constant for the heavy water vapor.The equilibrium properties of the dimerization process are described …
The microscopic orientation and position of photoactive molecules is crucial to the operation of optoelectronic devices such as OLEDs and solar cells. Here, we introduce a shape-persistent macrocyclic molecule as an excellent fluorescent probe to simply measure (i) its orientation by rotating the excitation polarization and recording the strength of modulation in photoluminescence (PL), and (ii) its position in a film by analyzing the overall PL brightness at the molecular level. The unique shape, the absorption and the fluorescence properties of this probe yields information on molecular orie…
Oxygen Isotope Exchange Between Molten Silicate Spherules and Ambient Water Vapor with Nonzero Relative Velocity: Implication for Chondrule Formation Environment
Water plays a key role in biological membrane transport. In ion channels and water-conducting pores (aquaporins), one dimensional confinement in conjunction with strong surface effects changes the physical behavior of water. In molecular dynamics simulations of water in short (0.8 nm) hydrophobic pores the water density in the pore fluctuates on a nanosecond time scale. In long simulations (460 ns in total) at pore radii ranging from 0.35 nm to 1.0 nm we quantify the kinetics of oscillations between a liquid-filled and a vapor-filled pore. This behavior can be explained as capillary evaporatio…
The evaporation of drops of water placed at the center of long poly(methyl methacrylate) microfluidic channels with a rectangular cross section of 0.38 mm2 is studied by simultaneously monitoring the shapes of two samples, one is in a 300 mT magnetic field, the other is in no field. A magnetic enhancement of the evaporation rate of up to 140 % is observed, which can be understood by treating the ortho and para nuclear isomers of water vapor as quasi-independent gasses with an ortho:para ratio in fresh vapor close to 2:3. It would take much longer than the 2 - 4 h duration of an experiment in t…
Anomalous behavior of water in superooled region (namely decrease of density and sharp increase of response functions at atmospheric pressure) are manly associated with either existence of liquid-liquid criticality or re-entering vapor-liquid spinodal into positive pressure. Despite different origin both scenarios introduce divergence of the response functions. We articulate in the communication that the criticality is behind water anomalies, water has normal vapor-liquid spinodal and that the re-entering feature was predicted because of curved density surface as a consequence of existence of …
In this paper we study the structure of the ice/vapor interface in the neighborhood of the triple point for the TIP4P/2005 model. We probe the fluctuations of the ice/film and film/vapor surfaces that separate the liquid film from the coexisting bulk phases at basal, primary prismatic and secondary prismatic planes. The results are interpreted using a coupled sine Gordon plus Interface Hamiltonian model. At large length-scales, the two bounding surfaces are correlated and behave as a single complex ice/vapor interface. For small length, on the contrary, the ice/film and film/vapor surfaces beh…
