Hydrodynamic slip can align thin nanoplatelets in shear flow

The large-scale processing of nanomaterials such as graphene and MoS2 relies on understanding the flow behaviour of nanometrically-thin platelets suspended in liquids. Here we show, by combining non-equilibrium molecular dynamics and continuum simulations, that rigid nanoplatelets can attain a stable orientation for sufficiently strong flows. Such a stable orientation is in contradiction with the rotational motion predicted by classical colloidal hydrodynamics. This surprising effect is due to hydrodynamic slip at the liquid-solid interface and occurs when the slip length is larger than the platelet thickness; a slip length of a few nanometers may be sufficient to observe alignment. The predictions we developed by examining pure and surface-modified graphene is applicable to different solvent/2D material combinations. The emergence of a fixed orientation in a direction nearly parallel to the flow implies a slip-dependent change in several macroscopic transport properties, with potential impact on applications ranging from functional inks to nanocomposites.Energy Technolog

Slip Boundary Conditions for the Compressible Navier–Stokes Equations

The slip boundary conditions for the compressible Navier–Stokes equations are derived systematically from the Boltzmann equation on the basis of the Chapman–Enskog solution of the Boltzmann equation and the analysis of the Knudsen layer adjacent to the boundary. The resulting formulas of the slip boundary conditions are summarized with explicit values of the slip coefficients for hard-sphere molecules as well as the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook (BGK) model. These formulas, which can be applied to specific problems immediately, help to prevent the use of often used slip boundary conditions that are either incorrect or without theoretical basis