Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Unsteady Nanoscale Thermal Transport Across A Solid-Fluid Interface, Ganesh Balasubramanian, Soumik Banerjee, Ishwar K. Puri

Ganesh Balasubramanian

We simulate unsteady nanoscale thermal transport at a solid-fluidinterface by placing cooler liquid-vapor Ar mixtures adjacent to warmer Fe walls. The equilibration of the system towards a uniform overall temperature is investigated using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations from which the heat flux is also determined explicitly. The Ar–Fe intermolecular interactions induce the migration of fluid atoms into quasicrystallineinterfacial layers adjacent to the walls, creating vacancies at the migration sites. This induces temperature discontinuities between the solidlikeinterfaces and their neighboring fluid molecules. The interfacial temperature difference and thus the heat flux decrease as the system equilibrates over time. The averaged interfacial …