Simulations of the Thermal Conductivity in the Vicinity of the Critical Point

Finite-size scaling study of dynamic critical phenomena in a vapor-liquid transition

Via a combination of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and finite-size scaling (FSS) analysis, we study dynamic critical phenomena for the vapor-liquid transition in a three dimensional Lennard-Jones system. The phase behavior of the model has been obtained via the Monte Carlo simulations. The transport properties, viz., the bulk viscosity and the thermal conductivity, are calculated via the Green-Kubo relations, by taking inputs from the MD simulations in the microcanonical ensemble. The critical singularities of these quantities are estimated via the FSS method. The results thus obtained are in nice agreement with the predictions of the dynamic renormalization group and mode-coupling theories.

Thermal conductivity of the Lennard-Jones chain fluid model

Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations have been performed to estimate, analyze, and correlate the thermal conductivity of a fluid composed of short Lennard-Jones chains (up to 16 segments) over a large range of thermodynamic conditions. It is shown that the dilute gas contribution to the thermal conductivity decreases when the chain length increases for a given temperature. In dense states, simulation results indicate that the residual thermal conductivity of the monomer increases strongly with density, but is weakly dependent on the temperature. Compared to the monomer value, it has been noted that the residual thermal conductivity of the chain was slightly decreasing with its length. Using these results, an empirical relation, including a contribution due to the critical enhancement, is proposed to provide an accurate estimation of the thermal conductivity of the Lennard-Jones chain fluid model (up to 16 segments) over the domain 0.8<or=T*<or=6 and 0<or=rho<or=1. Additionally, it has been noted that all reduced thermal conductivity values of the Lennard-Jones chain fluid model merge on the same "universal" curve when plotted as a function of the excess entropy. Furthermore, it is shown that the reduced configurational thermal conductivity of the Lennard-Jones chain fluid model is approximately proportional to the reduced excess entropy for all fluid states and all chain lengths.