Some effects of interface on fluid flow and heat transfer on micro- and nanoscale

Thermal conductivity of liquid argon in nanochannels from molecular dynamics simulations

The thermal conductivity of liquid argon in nanochannels has been calculated over a wide range of densities using two independent methods-the Green-Kubo approach in equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations and the Müller-Plathe method in non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. The Lennard-Jones potential was used to model interatomic interactions. The influence of transversal size and shape of a nanochannel on the thermal conductivity of liquid argon along the length of the channel has been investigated. The transversal size of nanochannel varied from 2.25 nm to 15 nm. The simulations revealed that the thermal conductivity weakly depends on the shape (square vs circular) of channel and scales with a cross-sectional area of nanochannel. It has been observed that thermal conductivity increases with an increase of the transversal size of the channel. Also, it reaches bulk values for some characteristic size of channel that depends strongly on density. Good agreement of the computed thermal conductivities of liquid argon over a wide density range with the experimental data allowed the value of the characteristic size of channel as a function of density to be estimated. This value depends on density and varies from 5 nm to 11 nm.

A uniform source-and-sink scheme for calculating thermal conductivity by nonequilibrium molecular dynamics

A uniform source-and-sink (USS) scheme, which combines features of the reverse [F. Müller-Plathe, J. Chem. Phys. 106, 6082 (1997)] and improved relaxation [B. Y. Cao, J. Chem. Phys. 129, 074106 (2008)] methods, is developed to calculate the thermal conductivity by nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD). The uniform internal heat source and sink are realized by exchanging the velocity vectors of individual atoms in the right half and left half systems, and produce a periodically quadratic temperature profile throughout the system. The thermal conductivity can be easily extracted from the mean temperatures of the right and left half systems rather than by fitting the temperature profiles. In particular, this scheme greatly increases the relaxation of the exited localized phonon modes which often worsen the calculation accuracy and efficiency in most other NEMD methods. The calculation of the thermal conductivities of solid argon shows that the simple USS scheme gives accurate results with fast convergence.

Molecular momentum transport at fluid-solid interfaces in MEMS/NEMS: a review

This review is focused on molecular momentum transport at fluid-solid interfaces mainly related to microfluidics and nanofluidics in micro-/nano-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS). This broad subject covers molecular dynamics behaviors, boundary conditions, molecular momentum accommodations, theoretical and phenomenological models in terms of gas-solid and liquid-solid interfaces affected by various physical factors, such as fluid and solid species, surface roughness, surface patterns, wettability, temperature, pressure, fluid viscosity and polarity. This review offers an overview of the major achievements, including experiments, theories and molecular dynamics simulations, in the field with particular emphasis on the effects on microfluidics and nanofluidics in nanoscience and nanotechnology. In Section 1 we present a brief introduction on the backgrounds, history and concepts. Sections 2 and 3 are focused on molecular momentum transport at gas-solid and liquid-solid interfaces, respectively. Summary and conclusions are finally presented in Section 4.