Influence of thermal fluctuations on nanoscale free-surface flows: A many-body dissipative particle dynamics study
Chengxi Zhao, Jiayi Zhao, Ting Si, Shuo Chen
Abstract
Free-surface fluid dynamics at the nanoscale is shown to strongly depend on thermal fluctuations. These fluctuations can be predicted by particle-based models numerically and analyzed by stochastic partial differential equations theoretically. In this work, we employ one of the particle methods, known as many-body dissipative particle dynamics (mDPD), to investigate the influence of thermal fluctuations on nanoscale free-surface flows. After enough independent simulations are performed for convincing ensemble-averaged results, mDPD not only shows good consistency with theories derived from the Landau–Lifshitz Navier–Stokes equations, but also indicates high efficiency in contrast with traditional molecular dynamics (MD). These results confirm that mDPD has capabilities of capturing the physics of fluctuating hydrodynamics in nanoscale free-surface flows, especially the complicated three-dimensional behaviors that cannot be predicted by theoretical models, both accurately and efficiently.