Abstract
There are problems in thermal engineering which require consideration in nano-scale or at molecular level. Nanofluidics is an example. Heat conduction in electronic device is another. In this paper, several examples are given from our recent works, which molecular simulations have made large contributions to. The first one concerns "nano bubbles"; molecular simulation reveals that surface tension and vapor pressure of a nano bubble hardly depend on its size and that the classical Young-Laplace equation is applicable even to a bubble as small as several nano meters. The second example is heat conduction in solid thin film. As the film thickness decreases to "phonon mean free path," the apparent thermal conductivity becomes smaller than the bulk value, the mechanism of which molecular simulation can explain.
