Investigation of entrance and exit effects on liquid transport through a cylindrical nanopore

Abstract

The entrance and exit effects on liquid transport through a nano-sized cylindrical pore under different solid wall–liquid interactions were studied by comparing molecular dynamics (MD) results of a finite length nanopore in a membrane with those of an infinite length one. The liquid transport through a finite length nanopore in a membrane was carried out by using a pressure-driven non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) method proposed by Huang et al. [C. Huang, K. Nandakumar, P. Choi and L. W. Kostiuk, J. Chem. Phys., 2006, 124, 234701]. The fluid motion through an infinite length nanopore, which had the same cross-stream dimension as the finite length channel in the membrane, but with periodic boundary conditions in the stream-wise direction, was carried out by using the external-field driven NEMD approach [J. Koplik, J. R. Bavanar and J. F. Willemsen, Phys. Rev. Lett., 1988, 60, 1282]. The NEMD results show that the pressure and density distributions averaged over the channel in the radial direction in both finite and infinite length channels are similar, but the radial distributions of the stream-wise velocity were significantly different when the solid wall was repulsive. The entrance and exit effects lead to a decrease in flow rate at about 39% for the repulsive wall and 6% for the neutral-like wall.