Description
Water confined within nanometre-scale pores exhibits structural and transport behaviour that can differ substantially from bulk water because interfacial forces, molecular ordering, wettability, adsorption, ionic composition and pore geometry become dominant as pore dimensions approach molecular length scales. This study develops an integrated multiscale framework connecting nanoconfined-water physics with performance optimization at material and geological-formation scales. The objectives are to quantify confinement and interfacial transport, evaluate the effects of adsorbed-water layers, hydrodynamic slip, wettability and salinity, and establish a physics-informed pathway for transferring nanoscale behaviour into effective hydraulic and formation-scale performance. The methodology combines analytical constitutive equations with reproducible numerical simulation in which pore width, radius, interfacial-layer thickness, slip length, contact angle and salinity are varied. The simulations produce a confinement parameter of 0.050–1.250 and effective diffusion coefficients of approximately 5.09 × 10⁻¹⁰–2.36 × 10⁻⁹ m² s⁻¹. Relative hydraulic conductance ranges from 7.72 × 10⁻⁴ to 0.843, while the maximum slip-modified flow enhancement is approximately 6.29. Capillary pressure reaches 124.7 MPa for the smallest evaluated pore at a 30° contact angle, whereas maximum normalized multiscale performance occurs at a characteristic pore radius of approximately 14.74 nm. These results demonstrate that macroscopic performance emerges from competing nanoscale mechanisms rather than porosity or permeability alone. Major challenges include uncertainty in confinement-dependent constitutive properties, scale-transfer errors, mineralogical heterogeneity, limited experimental validation and computational cost. The study concludes that explicit treatment of interfacial water is essential for physically defensible multiscale optimization. Future work should calibrate the model using molecular-dynamics calculations, neutron and X-ray scattering, quasielastic neutron scattering, NMR, nanofluidic measurements, digital-rock analysis and core-scale flow experiments, followed by uncertainty-aware formation-scale validation.
Keywords: nanoconfined water; multiscale modelling; nanoporous materials; wettability; pore-scale transport; geological formations; performance optimization
| Title | From Nanoconfined Water Physics to Formation-Scale Performance: An Integrated Multiscale Design and Optimization Framework |
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