Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) is a mesoscopic fluid modeling method, which facilitates the simulation of the statics and dynamics of complex fluid systems at physically interesting length and time scales. Currently, there are various applications of DPD, such as colloidal suspensions, multi-phase flow, rheology of polymer chains, DNA macromolecular suspension, etc., which employ this technique for their numerical simulation. The DPD technique is capable of modeling macroscopic properties of the bulk flow very well, but difficulties arise if the flows are confined through wall-bounded regions, or when different boundaries simultaneously exist in the simulation domain. These boundaries cause negative effects on the macroscopic temperature, density and velocity profiles, as well as the shear stress and pressure distributions. In particular, the interaction of DPD particles with solid boundaries causes large density fluctuations at the near wall regions. This density distortion leads to pronounced fluctuations in the pressure and shear stress, which are not actually present. To overcome these serious deficiencies, we introduce a new method in this work, which uses a combination of randomly distributed wall particles and a novel reflection adaptation at the wall. This new methodology is simple to implement and incurs no additional computational cost. More importantly, it does not cause any distortion in the macroscopic properties. This novel reflection adaptation is a novel version of the bounce back reflection, which we shall term the bounce-normal reflection. The most important characteristic of this method is that it reduces density fluctuations near the boundaries without affecting the velocity and temperature profiles. This new method is easily applicable to any wall-bounded problem with stationary boundaries and it has a very good consistency with macroscopic features. The eventual objective of this numerical development work is to investigate suspension flow through micro/nano channels of fluidic NEMS/MEMS devices, with applications to DNA and protein separation. These micro/nano channel devices, consisting of many entropic traps, are designed and fabricated for the separation of proteins and long DNA molecules.
Application of Nanometer Materials in Protein Separation
