Measuring temperature effects on nanobubble nucleation via a solid-state nanopore.

ABSTRACT

In this study, we designed SiNX solid-state nanopores to detect the temperature effect on the hydrogen nanobubble formation. Here, we integrated a temperature controller with the highly sensitive nanopore. As the temperature decreases from 25 °C to 5 °C, the occurrence of the nanobubble nucleation inside a 12.3 nm SiNX nanopore confined space decreased from 102 s-1 to 23 s-1, and the life-time of nanobubbles increased from 1.16 ms to 4.78 ms. The results further gave the activation energy for nanobubble nucleation which was 8.1 × 10-20 J with a 12.3 nm SiNX nanopore. Our method provides an efficient analytical tool for revealing the temperature-dependent nanobubble nucleation, which further benefits the fundamental understanding of nanobubble nucleation.