Dissipative particle dynamics simulations of liquid nanojet breakup

Abstract

In this work, we use a dissipative-particle-dynamics (DPD)-based two-phase model to study the breakup of liquid nanojets. We show that the breakup of nanojets is accelerated by the presence of thermal fluctuations. Satellite drops, which are undesirable from an application viewpoint, are not observed in our simulations. We find that the presence of a repulsive wall enclosing the DPD liquid is necessary to prevent clogging of nanojets. We are able to recover the time evolution of minimum jet radius as given by prior theoretical analysis. This study shows that DPD is able to capture the thermal induced breakup phenomena at the sub-micron level. The coarse-grained nature of DPD along with its flexibility to allow for the modeling of complex fluids in combination with the results from this study show that DPD is a useful tool for sub-micron fluid flow simulations.