Slip length in sheared liquid films subject to mixed
boundary conditions
Nikolai Priezjev, Anton Darhuber and Sandra Troian,
Phys. Rev. E 71, 041608 (2005)
Movie
Fluid flow in confined geometries can be significantly affected
by slip at the liquid/solid interface.
The measure of slip is the so-called slip length, which is defined
as an extrapolated distance relative to the wall where the tangential
velocity component vanishes, see picture below.
Factors that affect slip length include weak wall fluid attraction,
surface roughness, high shear rates and nucleation of nanobubbles
at hydrophobic surfaces.
Molecular dynamics
simulations provide a powerful tool for studying
the effect of these parameters on boundary conditions at the molecular level.
As discussed in our
paper, we investigated
the behavior of the slip length in simple fluids subject to planar
shear bounded by substrates with mixed boundary conditions.
This study was inspired by recent experiments which suggest a possible
presence of flat nanobubbles or dissolved gas at the liquid/solid
interface. A significant drag reduction could be achieved because
of no-shear stress (infinite slip) regions at the liquid/gas interface.
We mimic this situation by considering a shear flow past a surface
which is patterned with an infinite array of stripes representing
alternating regions of no-shear and finite slip, see picture below.
The question we try to answer is how the slip length depends on the
distribution of non-wetting regions?
In this work the fluid was subject to steady planar shear by translating
the upper homogeneous wall at a constant velocity U, while the lower,
patterned wall remained stationary, see picture below.
We reduced the
attractive part of Lennard-Jones potential
for fluid wall interactions to simulate non-wetting (white) stripes.
In this movie
we consider shear flow past a surface with a stripe width of about
6s, where s
is the molecular diameter characterizing the Lennard-Jones interaction.
Note the enhanced layering near the wetting patches
and reduced fluid density above the non-wetting regions.
Surprisingly, when the stripe width is of order of molecular diameter the alternating
wall potential represents effectively a rough surface.
These molecular scale corrugations created by the composite wall potential strongly
reduces the effective slip length in the transverse flow orientation,
leading eventually to a no-slip boundary condition at approximately
a~s.
The difference in the contact densities and relative velocities
above the wetting and non-wetting patches produces significant
oscillations in the averaged velocity profiles for large stripe widths.
We found that effective slip length increases monotonically with
stripe period to a saturation value for both parallel and transverse flow
orientations. Detailed
comparison
between the results of the hydrodynamic calculations and molecular dynamics simulations
shows excellent agreement when the length scale of the substrate pattern
geometry is roughly larger than ten molecular diameters.
Molecular Dynamics simulations described here were conducted with
LAMMPS numerical code.
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Mechanical Engineering
Michigan State University
