| « There is plenty of room at the bottom ». This visionary foresight of R. Feynman, introduced during a lecture at Caltech in 1959, was at the root of numerous scientific and technological developments, taking benefit of the "strange phenomena" occuring at the smallest scales. There remains however a lot to explore, in particular in the context of fluids at the nanoscales and their specific transport properties. In this talk, I will discuss some theoretical and experimental results obtained in our group on the fluid transport at small scales. I will in particular report experimental results for fluid transport inside a single Boron-Nitribe nanotube, obtained in a specifically developped trans-membrane nanofluidic device. Experiments show unprecedented energy conversion from salt concentration gradients. Applications in the field of sustainable energy harvesting will be discussed. |
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