The effect of orientation on near-field radiative heat transfer between two complex-shaped superellipsoid particles of SiO 2 is presented. The particles under study are 50 nm in radius and of variable concavity. Orientation is characterized by the degree of rotational symmetry in the two-particle systems, and the radiative conductance is calculated using the discrete system Green's function approach to account for all electromagnetic interactions. The results reveal that the total conductance in some orientations can be up to twice that of other orientations when particles are at a center-of-mass separation distance of 110 nm. Orientation effects are not significantly correlated with system rotational symmetries but are strongly correlated with the minimum vacuum gap distance between particles. As such, orientation effects on near-field radiative heat transfer are a consequence of particle topology, with more extreme topologies leading to a continuation of orientation effects at larger particle center-of-mass separation distances. The concave superellipsoid particles display significant orientation effects up to a center-of-mass separation distance approximately equal to 3.9 times the particle radius, while the convex superellipsoid particles display significant orientation effects up to a center-of-mass separation distance approximately equal to 3.2 times the particle radius. In contrast to previous anisotropic, spheroidal dipole studies, these results of complex-shaped superellipsoid particles suggest that orientation effects become negligible when heat transfer is a volumetric process for all orientations. This work is essential for understanding radiative transport between particles that have non-regular geometries or that may have geometrical defects or abnormalities.
more »
« less
Molecular dynamics simulations of anisotropic particles accelerated by neural-net predicted interactions
Rigid bodies, made of smaller composite beads, are commonly used to simulate anisotropic particles with molecular dynamics or Monte Carlo methods. To accurately represent the particle shape and to obtain smooth and realistic effective pair interactions between two rigid bodies, each body may need to contain hundreds of spherical beads. Given an interacting pair of particles, traditional molecular dynamics methods calculate all the inter-body distances between the beads of the rigid bodies within a certain distance. For a system containing many anisotropic particles, these distance calculations are computationally costly and limit the attainable system size and simulation time. However, the effective interaction between two rigid particles should only depend on the distance between their center of masses and their relative orientation. Therefore, a function capable of directly mapping the center of mass distance and orientation to the interaction energy between the two rigid bodies would completely bypass inter-bead distance calculations. It is challenging to derive such a general function analytically for almost any non-spherical rigid body. In this study, we have trained neural nets, powerful tools to fit nonlinear functions to complex datasets, to achieve this task. The pair configuration (center of mass distance and relative orientation) is taken as an input, and the energy, forces, and torques between two rigid particles are predicted directly. We show that molecular dynamics simulations of cubes and cylinders performed with forces and torques obtained from the gradients of the energy neural-nets quantitatively match traditional simulations that use composite rigid bodies. Both structural quantities and dynamic measures are in agreement, while achieving up to 23 times speedup over traditional molecular dynamics, depending on hardware and system size. The method presented here can, in principle, be applied to any irregular concave or convex shape with any pair interaction, provided that sufficient training data can be obtained.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2019897
- PAR ID:
- 10634058
- Publisher / Repository:
- AIP Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Journal of Chemical Physics
- Volume:
- 160
- Issue:
- 24
- ISSN:
- 0021-9606
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Understanding the orientation dynamics of anisotropic colloidal particles is important for suspension rheology and particle self-assembly. However, even for the simplest case of dilute suspensions in shear flow, the orientation dynamics of non-spherical Brownian particles are poorly understood. Here we analytically calculate the time-dependent orientation distributions for non-spherical axisymmetric particles confined to rotate in the flow–gradient plane, in the limit of small but non-zero Brownian diffusivity. For continuous shear, despite the complicated dynamics arising from the particle rotations, we find a coordinate change that maps the orientation dynamics to a diffusion equation with a remarkably simple ratio of the enhanced rotary diffusivity to the zero shear diffusion: $$D_{eff}^{r}/D_{0}^{r}=(3/8)(p-1/p)^{2}+1$$ , where $$p$$ is the particle aspect ratio. For oscillatory shear, the enhanced diffusion becomes orientation dependent and drastically alters the long-time orientation distributions. We describe a general method for solving the time-dependent oscillatory shear distributions and finding the effective diffusion constant. As an illustration, we use this method to solve for the diffusion and distributions in the case of triangle-wave oscillatory shear and find that they depend strongly on the strain amplitude and particle aspect ratio. These results provide new insight into the time-dependent rheology of suspensions of anisotropic particles. For continuous shear, we find two distinct diffusive time scales in the rheology that scale separately with aspect ratio $$p$$ , as $$1/D_{0}^{r}p^{4}$$ and as $$1/D_{0}^{r}p^{2}$$ for $$p\gg 1$$ . For oscillatory shear flows, the intrinsic viscosity oscillates with the strain amplitude. Finally, we show the relevance of our results to real suspensions in which particles can rotate freely. Collectively, the interplay between shear-induced rotations and diffusion has rich structure and strong effects: for a particle with aspect ratio 10, the oscillatory shear intrinsic viscosity varies by a factor of $${\approx}2$$ and the rotational diffusion by a factor of $${\approx}40$$ .more » « less
-
The interaction between two particles with shape or interaction anisotropy can be modeled using a pairwise potential energy function that depends on their relative position and orientation; however, this function is often challenging to mathematically formulate. Data-driven approaches for approximating anisotropic pair potentials have gained significant interest due to their flexibility and generality but often require large sets of training data, potentially limiting their feasibility when training data is computationally demanding to collect. Here, we investigate the use of multivariate polynomial interpolation to approximate anisotropic pair potentials from a limited set of prescribed particle configurations. We consider both standard Chebyshev polynomial interpolation as well as mixed-basis polynomial interpolation that uses trigonometric polynomials for coordinates along which the pair potential is known to be periodic. We exploit mathematical reasoning and physical knowledge to refine the interpolation domain and to design our interpolants. We test our approach on two-dimensional and three-dimensional model anisotropic nanoparticles, finding satisfactory approximations can be constructed in all cases.more » « less
-
Chiral fluids – such as fluids under rotation or a magnetic field as well as synthetic and biological active fluids – flow in a different way than ordinary ones. Due to symmetries broken at the microscopic level, chiral fluids may have asymmetric stress and viscosity tensors, for example giving rise to a hydrostatic torque or non-dissipative (odd) and parity-violating viscosities. In this article, we investigate the motion of rigid bodies in such an anisotropic fluid in the incompressible Stokes regime through the mobility matrix, which encodes the response of a solid body to forces and torques. We demonstrate how the form of the mobility matrix, which is usually determined by particle geometry, can be analogously controlled by the symmetries of the fluid. By computing the mobility matrix for simple shapes in a three-dimensional (3-D) anisotropic chiral fluid, we predict counterintuitive phenomena such as motion at an angle to the direction of applied forces and spinning under the force of gravity.more » « less
-
At low Reynolds numbers, axisymmetric ellipsoidal particles immersed in a shear flow undergo periodic tumbling motions known as Jeffery orbits, with the orbit determined by the initial orientation. Understanding this motion is important for predicting the overall dynamics of a suspension. While slender fibres may follow Jeffery orbits, many such particles in nature are neither straight nor rigid. Recent work exploring the dynamics of curved or elastic fibres have found Jeffery-like behaviour along with chaotic orbits, decaying orbital constants and cross-streamline drift. Most work focuses on particles with reflectional symmetry; we instead consider the behaviour of a composite asymmetric slender body made of two straight rods, suspended in a two-dimensional shear flow, to understand the effects of the shape on the dynamics. We find that for certain geometries the particle does not rotate and undergoes persistent drift across streamlines, the magnitude of which is consistent with other previously identified forms of cross-streamline drift. For this class of particles, such geometry-driven cross-streamline motion may be important in giving rise to dispersion in channel flows, thereby potentially enhancing mixing.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

