Molecular Simulation of Thermo-osmotic Slip

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Jul 21;119(3):038002. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.038002. Epub 2017 Jul 21.

Abstract

Thermo-osmotic slip-the flow induced by a thermal gradient along a surface-is a well-known phenomenon, but curiously there is a lack of robust molecular-simulation techniques to predict its magnitude. Here, we compare three different molecular-simulation techniques to compute the thermo-osmotic slip at a simple solid-fluid interface. Although we do not expect the different approaches to be in perfect agreement, we find that the differences are barely significant for a range of different physical conditions, suggesting that practical molecular simulations of thermo-osmotic slip are feasible.