Development of a numerical model for Marangoni convection in the micro-scale environment

Abstract

Marangoni convection is induced in liquids by surface tension gradient along a free surface. Such flows also develop in nano- and micro-scale systems and play important roles. To have a better understanding for the phenomena occurring in processing of such micro-scale systems, generally two kinds of numerical simulation approaches have been considered: continuum and discrete (molecular dynamics). While the continuum-based techniques cannot capture the intermolecular effects, the molecular dynamics approach requires huge computational cost. To address the adverse futures of these techniques, a new numerical method has been developed by combining the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) from the continuum side and Langevin dynamics from the discrete approach. The present simulation results have shown that this new numerical technique can successfully study and predict the phenomena occurring in macro-scale process applications.