Transport of water in soft confinement

The project aims at establishing a new model to describe water transport in soft porous materials which accounts for coupling between adsorption, deformation and transport. In contrary to water transport in condensed matter, soft materials present much more complex processes and a complete picture of transport is lacking. We therefore propose to investigate water transport in polymers with intrinsic microporosity (PIM-1) under relevant conditions of mechanical stress and hydrostatics pressures. First, structural deformations of the polymer and of its microporosity (pore dimension < 2 nm) in these conditions will be investigated (proposal submitted on NIMROD). Then, transport mechanisms at the microscopic scale will be investigated by quasi-elastic incoherent neutron scattering on IRIS. We request for these experiments 5 days on IRIS.