Development of a numerical model for marangoni convection in the micro-scale environment

Abstract

Marangoni convection is induced in liquids by surface tension gradient along a free surface. Such flows also de-velop in nano-and micro-scale systems and play important roles. To have a better understanding for the phenomena occurring in processing of such micro-scale systems, generally two kinds of numerical simulation approaches have been considered: continuum and discrete (molecular dynamics). While the continuum-based techniques cannot capture the intermolecular effects, the molecular dynamics approach requires huge computational cost. To ad-dress the adverse futures of these techniques, a new numerical method has been developed by combining the computational f luid dynamics (CFD) from the continuum side and Langevin dynamics from the discrete ap-proach. The present simulation results have shown that this new numerical technique can successfully study and predict the phenomena occurring in macro-scale process applications.