Uniform diffusion of acetonitrile inside carbon nanotubes favors supercapacitor performance.

An unusual behavior of liquid acetonitrile (AN) confined inside carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is predicted by molecular dynamics simulation. In contrast to water, which shows inhomogeneous variation of both translational and rotational diffusion with CNT diameter [ Nano Lett. 2003, 3, 589; 2004, 4, 619], the diffusion coefficient of AN changes uniformly and can be described by a simple analytic model.