Role of Solid Wall Properties in the Interface Slip of Liquid in Nanochannels

Abstract

A two-dimensional molecular dynamics model of the liquid flow inside rough nanochannels is developed to investigate the effect of a solid wall on the interface slip of liquid in nanochannels with a surface roughness constructed by rectangular protrusions. The liquid structure, velocity profile, and confined scale on the boundary slip in a rough nanochannel are investigated, and the comparison of those with a smooth nanochannel are presented. The influence of solid wall properties, including the solid wall density, wall-fluid coupling strength, roughness height and spacing, on the interfacial velocity slip are all analyzed and discussed. It is indicated that the rough surface induces a smaller magnitude of the density oscillations and extra energy losses compared with the smooth solid surface, which reduce the interfacial slip of liquid in a nanochannel. In addition, once the roughness spacing is very small, the near-surface liquid flow dominates the momentum transfer at the interface between liquid and solid wall, causing the role of both the corrugation of wall potential and wall-fluid coupling strength to be less obvious. In particular, the slip length increases with increasing confined scales and shows no dependence on the confined scale once the confined scale reaches a critical value. The critical confined scale for the rough channel is larger than that of the smooth scale.