Water Flow in Nanoporous Shale

Water flow at the nanoscale has tremendous implications in diverse technological applications (Siria et al., 2013; Cui et al., 2001; Geng et al., 2014; Afsharpoor & Javadpour, 2016; Cui et al., 2017). The transport behavior of water molecules in nanoscale geometries differs greatly from pipe flow (Pérez-Hernández et al., 2012; Zhang et al., 2018b) due to the noticeable interactions between water and solids. Intense research has been conducted to explain and characterize the structural, thermodynamic, and transport properties of water confined in nanoscale geometries since the early 2000s. However, modeling the process in complex geometrical nanostructures at laboratory or prototype scales remains out of reach, making water flow in nanoporous shale a new and nearly untouched research topic.