Taku Ohara

Thermal conductivity of silicon nanowire by nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations

The thermal conductivity of silicon nanowires was predicted using the nonequilibrium molecular dynamics method using the Stillinger–Weber potential model and the Nose–Hoover thermostat. The dependence of the thermal conductivity on the wire length, cross-sectional area, and temperature was investigated. The surface along the longitudinal direction was set as a free boundary with potential boundaries in the other directions. The cross-sectional areas of the nanowires ranged from about 5 to 19 nm2 with lengths ranging from 6 to 54 nm. The thermal conductivity dependence on temperature agrees well with the experimental results. The reciprocal of the thermal conductivity was found to be linearly related to the nanowire length. These results quantitatively show that decreasing the cross-sectional area reduces the phonon mean free path in nanowires.

Molecular dynamics study of thermal phenomena in an ultrathin liquid film sheared between solid surfaces: the influence of the crystal plane on energy and momentum transfer at solid-liquid interfaces.

A molecular dynamics study has been performed on a liquid film sheared between moving solid walls. Thermal phenomena that occur in the Couette-like flow were examined, including energy conversion from macroscopic flow energy to thermal energy, i.e., viscous heating in the macroscopic sense, and heat conduction from the liquid film to the solid wall via liquid-solid interfaces. Four types of crystal planes of fcc lattice were assumed for the surface of the solid wall. The jumps in velocity and temperature at the interface resulting from deteriorated transfer characteristics of thermal energy and momentum at the interface were observed. It was found that the transfer characteristics of thermal energy and momentum at the interfaces are greatly influenced by the types of crystal plane of the solid wall surface which contacts the liquid film. The mechanism by which such a molecular scale structure influences the energy transfer at the interface was examined by analyzing the molecular motion and its contribution to energy transfer at the solid-liquid interface.

Molecular-Scale Mechanism of Thermal Resistance at the Solid-Liquid Interfaces: Influence of Interaction Parameters Between Solid and Liquid Molecules

The solid-liquid interfacial thermal resistance is getting more and more important as various solid-liquid systems are utilized in nanoscale, such as micro electro-mechanical systems/nano electro-mechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS) with liquids and nanoparticle suspension in liquids. The present paper deals with the transport of thermal energy through the solid-liquid interfaces, and the goal is to find a molecular-scale mechanism that determines the macroscopic characteristics of the transport phenomena. Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations have been performed for systems of a liquid film confined between atomistic solid walls. The two solid walls have different temperatures to generate a steady thermal energy flux in the system, which is the element of macroscopic heat conduction flux. Three kinds of liquid molecules and three kinds of solid walls are examined, and the thermal energy flux is measured at the control surfaces in the liquid film and at the solid-liquid interfaces. The concept of boundary thermal resistance is extended, and it is defined for each degree of freedom of translational motion of the molecules. It is found that the interaction strength between solid and liquid molecules uniformly affects all boundary thermal resistances defined for each degree of freedom; the weaker interaction increases all the resistances at the same rate and vice versa. The boundary thermal resistances also increase when the solid and liquid molecules are incommensurate, but the incommensurability has a greater influence on the boundary thermal resistances corresponding to the molecular motion parallel to the interface than that for the normal component. From these findings it is confirmed that the thermal resistance for the components parallel to the interface is associated with the molecular-scale corrugation of the surface of the solid wall, and that the thermal resistance for the component normal to the interface is governed by the number density of the solid molecules that are in contact with the liquid.

A molecular dynamics study on heat conduction characteristics in DPPC lipid bilayer

In this paper, nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations were performed on a single component 1,2-dipalmitoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphatidylcholine lipid bilayer in order to investigate the thermal conductivity and its anisotropy. To evaluate the thermal conductivity, we applied a constant heat flux to the lipid bilayer along and across the membrane with ambient water. The contribution of molecular interaction to the heat conduction was also evaluated. Along the bilayer plane, there is little transfer of thermal energy by the interaction between lipid molecules as compared with the interaction between water molecules. Across the bilayer plane, the local thermal conductivity depends on the constituents (i.e., water, head group, and tail group of lipid molecule) that occupy the domain. Although the intramolecular transfer of thermal energy in the tail groups of lipid molecules works efficiently to promote high local thermal conductivity in this region, the highest thermal resistance appears at the center of lipid bilayer where acyl chains of lipid molecules face each other due to a loss of covalent-bond and low number density. The overall thermal conductivities of the lipid bilayer in the directions parallel and perpendicular to the lipid membrane have been compared, and it was found that the thermal conductivity normal to the membrane is higher than that along the membrane, but it is still smaller than that of bulk water.

Contribution of inter- and intramolecular energy transfers to heat conduction in liquids

The molecular dynamics expression of heat flux, originally derived by Irving and Kirkwood [J. Chem. Phys. 18, 817 (1950)] for pairwise potentials, is generalized in this paper for systems with many-body potentials. The original formula consists of a kinetic part and a potential part, and the latter term is found in the present study to be expressible as a summation of contributions from all the many-body potentials defined in the system. The energy transfer among a set of sites for which a many-body potential is defined is discussed and evaluated by the rate of increase in the kinetic energy of each site due to the potential, and its accumulation over all the potentials in the system is shown to make up the potential part of the generalized expression. A molecular dynamics simulation for liquid n-octane was performed to demonstrate the applicability of the new expression obtained in this study to measure the heat flux and to elucidate the contributions of inter- and intramolecular potentials to heat conduction.

Effect of molecular elongation on the thermal conductivity of diatomic liquids

The effect of molecular elongation on the thermal conductivity of diatomic liquids has been analyzed using a nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) method. The two-center Lennard-Jones model was used to express the intermolecular potential acting on liquid molecules. The simulations were performed using the nondimensional form of the potential so that the molecular elongation, d/σ, was the only parameter varied in the simulation. The simulations were performed for five values of this parameter. First, the equation of state of each liquid was obtained using equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation, and the critical temperature, density, and pressure of each liquid were determined. Then, NEMD simulations of heat conduction in the five liquids were performed using values for temperature and density which were identical among the five liquids when they were reduced by their respective critical temperature and density (T=0.7 Tcr and ρ=2.24 ρcr). Obtained thermal conductivities were reduced by the critical t...

Effect of crosslink formation on heat conduction in amorphous polymers

We performed molecular dynamics (MD) simulations on amorphous polyethylene (PE) and polystyrene (PS) in order to elucidate the effect of crosslinks between polymer chains on heat conduction. In each polymer system, thermal conductivities were measured for a range of crosslink concentration by using nonequilibrium MD techniques. PE comprised of 50 carbon atom long chains exhibited slightly higher conductivity than that of 250 carbon atom long chains at the standard state. In both cases for PE, crosslinking significantly increased conductivity and the increase was more or less proportional to the crosslink density. On the other hand, in the PS case, although the thermal conductivity increased with the crosslinking, the magnitude of change in thermal conductivity was relatively small. We attribute this difference to highly heterogeneous PS based network including phenyl side groups. In order to elucidate the mechanism for the increase of thermal conductivity with the crosslink concentration, we decomposed en...

A molecular dynamics study on heat transfer characteristics at the interfaces of alkanethiolate self-assembled monolayer and organic solvent

In this paper, we present molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of interfaces composed of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) and solvents in order to investigate the heat transfer characteristics at the interface. Two typical normal alkylthiolate SAMs with different chain lengths, i.e., 1-propanethiol C(3)H(7)SH and 1-dodecanethiol (C(12)H(25)SH) chemically adsorbed on Au(111) substrate surfaces, were used, and toluene was adopted as the organic solvent. In addition to the SAM systems, an interface composed of the bare solid substrate and solvent (without SAMs) was analyzed for comparison. Nonequilibrium MD simulations, in which a temperature gradient perpendicular to the interface was imposed, were performed and the difference in thermal boundary resistance in the interface systems was discussed. We observed that the SAM interfaces have smaller thermal resistance when compared with that of the bare solid interface. In order to understand the mechanisms of the small resistance at the SAM-solvent interfaces, the vibrational character of molecules in each phase, which contacted each other at the interface was analyzed and a detailed adsorbed structure of solvent molecule in the interface region was extracted. As a result, a clear difference in these characters was found between the SAM interfaces and bare solid interface.

Molecular dynamics study on ultrathin liquid water film sheared between platinum solid walls: Liquid structure and energy and momentum transfer

Molecular dynamics simulation has been performed on a liquid film that is sheared in between solid surfaces. As a shear is given to the liquid film, a Couette-like flow is generated in the liquid and energy conversion occurs from the macroscopic flow to the thermal energy, which is discharged back to the solid walls. In such a way, momentum and thermal energy fluxes are present simultaneously. And all these thermal and fluid phenomena take place in highly nonequilibrium state where thermal energy is not distributed equally to each degree of freedom of molecular motion in the vicinities of the solid-liquid interface. In the present paper, platinum and water are employed as solid and liquid, respectively. First, the structure and orientation of water molecules in the vicinities of the solid surfaces are analyzed and how these structure and orientation are influenced by the shear is considered. Based on this result, momentum and thermal energy transfer in the vicinities of and at the solid-liquid interfaces are investigated in detail. Results are compared with those of our previous study, in which monatomic and diatomic molecules are employed as liquid.

Energy dissipation in non-isothermal molecular dynamics simulations of confined liquids under shear.

Energy is commonly dissipated in molecular dynamics simulations by using a thermostat. In non-isothermal shear simulations of confined liquids, the choice of the thermostat is very delicate. We show in this paper that under certain conditions, the use of classical thermostats can lead to an erroneous description of the dynamics in the confined system. This occurs when a critical shear rate is surpassed as the thermo-viscous effects become prominent. In this high-shear-high-dissipation regime, advanced dissipation methods including a novel one are introduced and compared. The MD results show that the physical modeling of both the accommodation of the surface temperature to liquid heating and the heat conduction through the confining solids is essential. The novel method offers several advantages on existing ones including computational efficiency and easiness of application for complex systems.