The dynamics of fluid flow through nanochannels is different from those in macroscopic systems. By using the molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the influence of surface polarity of nanotube on the transport properties of the water fluid. The nanotube used here resembles the carbon nanotube, but carries charges of q on some atoms; overall, the nanotube is charge-neutral. Our simulation results show that water flux decreases sharply with the increasing of q for q 〈 1.6 e; however, the water flux for shells far away from nanotube wM1 increases slightly when q 〉 1.6 e. The mechanism behind the interesting phenomenon is discussed. Our findings may have implications for development of nano-fluidic devices and for understanding the movement of confined fluid inside the hydrophilic nanochannel.
The finite volume method (FVM) and the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) are coupled with each other to construct a new cross-scaling method to deal with the porous flow problem. To check the effectiveness of our developed cross-scaling LBM-FVM, the above mentioned problem is also solved by the well known LBM-LBM. Based on the data checking of the published data and the results of LBM-FVM and LBM-LBM, good agreement is observed.