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 the coupling between water transport and mechanical stress in polymers with intrinsic microporosity (PIM) under relevant conditions of mechanical stress and of a hydraulic pressure, responsible for transport. Structural deformations of the polymer and of its microporosity (pore dimension < 2 nm) in these conditions will be investigated on NIMROD. We request for this experiment 3 days on NIMROD.