Thanks to the World Community Grid volunteers, now we have accumulated a huge amount of data from simulations which we believe could tell us what happens when water flows through carbon nanotubes at flow rates that are typical of real filters, which means in the range 0.1 to 1 m/s. To do this with high precision requires averaging data over millions of simulations.

During the past few months, we've been focusing on trying to understand an unusual and unexpected effect which we observe when analyzing all this data. The effect we see is fairly regular oscillations of the flow resistance at the interface between the water and the nanotube, as a function of the flow rate. Recently, our team was able to make substantial progress in understanding this interesting observation. From further analysis, we believe that the there is a coupling between the flowing water and phonons – which are a sort of collective oscillation of atoms - within the carbon nanotubes. This coupling seems to play an important role at low flow rates (e.g. < 5 m/s). Since all previous studies focus on much higher flow rates, this was easy to overlook. To better understand this effect, we are currently carrying out several comparative simulations. We will let you know as soon as we have more definitive results, which we hope can be before the end of the year. Depending on the outcome, we'll take stock and decide whether we may need to do further simulations with C4CW.

Thanks again to everyone for your cooperation, and patient support of this research effort.

The C4CW Team