The influence of nanoparticles on the evaporation of nanodroplets molecular dynamics and experimental investigations

Abstract

newline Evaporation of liquid droplets and the factors affecting the rate of evaporation of newlineliquid droplets, sessile, or suspended in air has drawn much interest in the recent newlinepast owing to its promising applications in inkjet printing, nanopatterning, DNA newlinestretching, DNA mapping, drug delivery, film coating, combustion of liquid fuels and newlinecooling. Ascertaining the various mechanisms associated with droplet evaporation, newlinepinning, depinning, spreading, and contact line dynamics have been the primary focus newlineof many studies. Investigating the characteristics of droplet evaporation influenced newlineby the molecular level mechanisms involving multiphase physics is still inaccessible newlineby experiments. Even though a droplet with a few nanometers in diameters would be newlinea prudent system for studying the evaporation, analogously little was apprehended newlineabout droplet evaporation till recently. Studying the evaporation of nanosized droplets newlineunder extreme temperature gradients was hindered by the lack of methods to manage newlinethe problem of heat and mass fluxes as the nanodroplet undergoes evaporation. newlineThe ability to numerically model and accurately predict the evaporation process newlinethus becomes essential. A more fundamental approach to investigate nanoscale newlinephenomena in this regime could be using atomistic simulation methods like Molecular newlineDynamics (MD) simulation. newlineThe present work focuses on the implementation of Non-Equilibrium Molecular newlineDynamics (NEMD) simulations to understand the evaporation of a liquid droplet newlinein the presence of a solid nanoparticle. The influence of solid-liquid interaction newlinestrength (and#949;sl) on the evaporation properties are studied. MD simulations showed that newlinethe addition of nanoparticles to the liquid droplet results in a slower evaporation newlinerate when compared to that of a pure droplet.