No Arabic abstract
The present study addresses the role of molecular non-equilibrium effects in thermal ignition problems. We consider a single binary reaction of the form A+B -> C+C. Molecular dynamics calculations were performed for activation energies ranging between RT and 7.5RT and heat release of 2.5RT and 10RT. The evolution of up to 10,000 particles was calculated as the system undergoes a thermal ignition at constant volume. Ensemble averages of 100 calculations for each parameter set permitted to determine the ignition delay, along with a measure of the stochasticity of the process. A well behaved convergence to large system sizes is also demonstrated. The ignition delay calculations were compared with those obtained at the continuum level using rates derived from kinetic theory: the standard rate assuming that the distribution of the speed of the particles is the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and the perturbed rates by Prigogine and Xhrouet [1] for an isothermal system, and Prigogine and Mahieu [2] for an energy releasing reaction, obtained by the Chapman-Enskog perturbation procedure. The molecular results were found in very good agreement with the latter at low temperatures, confirming that non-equilibrium effects promote the formation of energetic particles, that serve as seeds for subsequent reaction events: i.e., hot spots. This effect was found to lower the ignition delay by up to 30%. At high temperatures, the ignition delay obtained from the standard equilibrium rate was found to be up to 60% longer than the molecular calculations. This effect is due to the rapidity of the reactive collisions that do not allow the system to equilibrate. For this regime, none of the perturbation solutions obtained by the Chapman-Enskog procedure were valid. This study thus shows the importance of non-equilibrium effects in thermal ignition problems, for most temperatures of practical interest.
The non-equilibrium Greens function (NEGF) method with Buttiker probe scattering self-energies is assessed by comparing its predictions for the thermal boundary resistance with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. For simplicity, the interface of Si/heavy-Si is considered, where heavy-Si differs from Si only in the mass value. With Buttiker probe scattering parameters tuned against MD in homogeneous Si, the NEGF-predicted thermal boundary resistance quantitatively agrees with MD for wide mass ratios. Artificial resistances that the unaltered Landauer approach yield at virtual interfaces in homogeneous systems are absent in the present NEGF approach. Spectral information result from NEGF in its natural representation without further transformations. The spectral results show that the scattering between different phonon modes plays a crucial role in thermal transport across interfaces. Buttiker probes provide an efficient and reliable way to include anharmonicity in phonon related NEGF. NEGF including the Buttiker probes can reliably predict phonon transport across interfaces and at finite temperatures.
The problem of thermal ignition in a homogeneous gas is revisited from a molecular dynamics perspective. A two-dimensional model is adopted, which assumes reactive disks of type A and B in a fixed area that react to form type C products if an activation threshold for impact is surpassed. Such a reaction liberates kinetic energy to the product particles, representative of the heat release. The results for the ignition delay are compared with those obtained from the continuum description assuming local thermodynamic equilibrium, in order to assess the role played by molecular fluctuations. Results show two regimes of non-equilibrium ignition whereby ignition occurs at different times as compared to that from the continuum description. The first regime is at low activation energies, where the ignition time is found to be higher than that expected from theory for all values of heat release, in agreement with predictions from Prigogine and Xhrouet who attribute this departure to non-equilibrium effects. Results suggest the ignition is spatially homogeneous in this regime. The second regime occurs at high activation energies and sufficiently large heat release values. In this regime, ignition times are found to be dependent on domain size, with larger domains yielding shorter ignition delays than expected. Results for larger systems agree with the expectations by Prigogine and Mahieu, who predict a non-equilibrium reaction rate larger than expected for a homogeneous system in equilibrium. Results yield a large variance for ignition times under these conditions, suggesting a departure from homogeneous combustion. The results obtained are in qualitative agreement with experimental observations of auto-ignition at relatively low temperatures, where hot-spot ignition and associated ignition delays lower than predicted are generally observed.
We have extended our recent molecular-dynamic simulations of memristors to include the effect of thermal inhomogeneities on mobile ionic species appearing during operation of the device. Simulations show a competition between an attractive short-ranged interaction between oxygen vacancies and an enhanced local temperature in creating/destroying the conducting oxygen channels. Such a competition would strongly affect the performance of the memristive devices.
We show that the centroid molecular dynamics (CMD) method provides a realistic way to calculate the thermal diffusivity $a=lambda/rho c_{rm V}$ of a quantum mechanical liquid such as para-hydrogen. Once $a$ has been calculated, the thermal conductivity can be obtained from $lambda=rho c_{rm V}a$, where $rho$ is the density of the liquid and $c_{rm V}$ is the constant-volume heat capacity. The use of this formula requires an accurate quantum mechanical heat capacity $c_{rm V}$, which can be obtained from a path integral molecular dynamics simulation. The thermal diffusivity can be calculated either from the decay of the equilibrium density fluctuations in the liquid or by using the Green-Kubo relation to calculate the CMD approximation to $lambda$ and then dividing this by the corresponding approximation to $rho c_{rm V}$. We show that both approaches give the same results for liquid para-hydrogen and that these results are in good agreement with experimental measurements of the thermal conductivity over a wide temperature range. In particular, they correctly predict a decrease in the thermal conductivity at low temperatures -- an effect that stems from the decrease in the quantum mechanical heat capacity and has eluded previous para-hydrogen simulations. We also show that the method gives equally good agreement with experimental measurements for the thermal conductivity of normal liquid helium.
The collective dynamics of liquid Gallium close to the melting point has been studied using Inelastic X-ray Scattering to probe lengthscales smaller than the size of the first coordination shell. %(momentum transfers, $Q$, $>$15 nm$^{-1}$). Although the structural properties of this partially covalent liquid strongly deviate from a simple hard-sphere model, the dynamics, as reflected in the quasi-elastic scattering, are beautifully described within the framework of the extended heat mode approximation of Enskogs kinetic theory, analytically derived for a hard spheres system. The present work demonstrates the applicability of Enskogs theory to non hard- sphere and non simple liquids.